Heidi HO! Welcome. Thanks for coming. You might want to grab myRSS feed. I also welcome calls at 614-312-1941 about just about anything.
So I talked a little about personal branding yesterday. It’s a different concept than Reputation Management. I want to make that utterly clear. Personal branding is representing who you are. Reputation Management is engaging the conversation about yourself, it’s about putting your best foot forward, on purpose, so people see the side of you that best reflects who you want to be.
Reputation Management Vs. Personal Branding
Reputation Management is tactical. Personal Branding is strategic. Both of them start with character management–not being a jackass, and not kicking hornets nets.
So, a while ago, I posted about Westerville Dentist Susan Stalnaker on my personal blog. I was making a riff more or less about the idea that symbols are important. How you’re percieved by your customers. I wanted to know, what it meant when you took the best parking spot with an easily identifiable car with bad vanity plates. How insulted I’d feel as a customer. She seemed to me to be undoing a good career as a dentist by not paying attention to detail, and by not managing the symbols in her business.
What happened then was interesting–now when you google Westerville Dentist Susan Salnaker, or even Susan Stalnaker, my post comes up in the top 3 every time. The other one is my friend, Central PA Webmaster Ryan Hartman. This was not my attempt to assasinate her rep. This was just me riffing on a bad symbol.
Now, what she SHOULD have and COULD have done was preempt this. For just a few bucks, you can control what people say about you on line. If you have the basics, a Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter account, you push the bad stuff down the page. A few articles in some directories, and it helps more.
Action Steps:
1.) Get on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn.
2.) Make a blog at either WordPress.Com or some other spot.
3.) Get on some video site, preferably YouTube or DailyMotion.
4.) Put the links in the posts as soon as you can.
That’s it. Then, no matter what anyone says about you, you’ll be taken care of online. You will have better & older & more authoritative posts on the matter. You will have a platform to spring from, to show up and to tell your story.
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