Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

I guest posted on Keith Ferrazzi’s blog over a week ago. I felt that this post was so important that I had to re-post it here for you to read.

Reputation management consists of tracking your personal brand both online and offline and reacting when necessary.

A lot of people think that personal branding is synonymous with reputation management, but I like to position it as routine maintenance, after you’ve already established yourself.

• On the web, reputation management is when you have to monitor the web for sites that have cited your brand name.
• Offline, reputation management is where you assess the success or failure of your brand by seeking feedback from your network.

Reputation management is mandatory for career development and personal brand management. Let’s face it, it’s nearing 2009 and if you aren’t online right now, what are you waiting for!? People are already creating loads of content. There are over 80 million YouTube videos, over 110 million blogs and over 230 million profiles on the largest social networks (Facebook & MySpace). Content that is created on one website can travel to others and people can comment on you at an instant.

Do you know what people are saying about you?

If you want to know how to track your presence and monitor your brand, then you are in luck. Below are the top 5 tools for your personal reputation management. They can be used for product and corporate brands as well. Use each to search, locate and respond when necessary.

Google – Google.com/alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe through email and RSS. Many people use their RSS readers to view these alerts and PR agencies use alerts to track their campaigns. You can monitor a news story, keep current with your industry and competitors and see who is writing about you.

Blog posts – Technorati.com

If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati tracks “blog reactions” or blogs that link to yours, upon registration. Search for your name on Technorati and subscribe to RSS alerts, so when someone blogs about you, you will find out.

Blog comments – backtype.com

Recently, a new service came out to solve the problem of monitoring blog comments. Think about it, someone can comment on you on a series of blogs, but if you only track posts, you’ll really miss out. BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you.

Discussion boards – boardtracker.com

Aside from blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel when people can gather in a community and talk about YOU. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information they viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.

Twitter – search.twitter.com

Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light and if you don’t catch them, they will spread like a viral. Using Twitter search you can locate any instances of your name and either tweet back or remain silent.

All five of these free tools can be used to monitor your company’s brand name as well. If you aren’t taking care of your online reputation, others will. It’s time to find out what people are saying and do something about it.