How to Protect Your Online Brand
The Internet offers a great way for you to get yourself "out there" on a worldwide basis, reaching customers and clients that you might not have access to because of geography. It also brings us all a little bit closer together, and you have the potential to extend your reach and make more profits.
Even if you aren't directly selling anything online, you can benefit from being online. These days, you are a brand, whether you are looking for a new job or hoping to gain some credibility in your professional life. Online search is used by almost everyone to gain some background and insight on you. Having an online brand is essential in today's world.
Unfortunately, online branding isn't always positive. It's possible for others to hijack your brand. You might appear in a negative light when this happens, or you might even be surprised to find someone else masquerading as you and putting out content that you would never approve of. Not only is it important to build your online brand, but you also have to protect it.
Claiming Your Online Brand
The first step to protecting your online brand is to claim it. Do what you can to claim social media accounts so that someone else doesn't grab your name. I know someone who wishes that she had claimed her full name on Twitter, rather than a shortened version. Now someone else has claimed her @ full-name handle on Twitter.
If you have a common name, it might be harder to claim your social media profiles; however, you should still make the attempt, and make it a point to be consistent with the identification you choose. Grab your social accounts and take control before someone else does so—and possibly pretends to be you.
In addition to setting up your accounts on major social sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and (now) Periscope, it also makes sense to be consistent across your pages. Use the same avatar for each site. If you are setting up pages and accounts for your business, use your logo as the image for all the sites. Be consistent so that it's easy for people to see that it's you, and so that they can follow you across platforms.
Another way to claim your online brand is to start a blog or website. Try to use a domain name that is related to your own name. You can add regular content so that it's easy to see who you are and let others stay on top of the latest news. Plus, you'll build a backlog of content that makes it easier for you to show up in search engines when people want to find you.
Protect Your Online Brand
Once you claim your brand online, you need to protect it. Realize that there are people out there making money by trashing others' brands. Protecting your online brand means that, to some degree, you need to be able to control the message, or at least control what others see when they search for you. Search engines can be manipulated so that the top search results are negative and damaging. Just ask politicians who have found their official sites spoofed by reputation-damaging sites in the search engines.
Reputation management sites help you dominate the search results by putting your own information ahead of lower-authority negative information. This can push search results that are negative beyond the second page of results, where they are less likely to be seen. Reputation management services range in price from free to costing hundreds of dollars a month. You can often be involved in posting your own information, or you can pay for a package that involves the company writing on your behalf as well as working to keep your good results higher in search engine rankings.
Don't let someone hijack your brand and destroy it. Claim and protect your online brand, and you'll reap the rewards.
