How to monitor your personal brand
Your personal brand is a combination of your online and offline reputations, and your private and professional reputations. These combine into four different reputations that need to be managed carefully:
Private/Offline – You are your most authentic self when surrounded by friends and family. You can relax and let your guard down, however, if you don’t treat those who care about you most with love, kindness and respect, then what hope is there for the rest of us? You don’t need to monitor your personal brand here, just be yourself.
Professional/Offline – Your offline professional reputation is perhaps one of the most important facet of your personal brand. How you behave at work, and with those that you work with, will follow you long after you have left an organisation. This is where you need to work hardest on your personal brand. How many reputations have been ruined by something that done at work or via a work email? With the internet, these can episodes go viral, and impact on their online professional reputation too.
Private/Online – With your private/online profile, try and keep your private life private. You’re various online social media accounts will usually tell you when you have been mentioned, and you can prevent people tagging you in photos on Facebook. Periodically check what other people can see, especially on Facebook, as sometimes the settings change from private to public without you noticing.
Professional/Online – Once you have your personal branding kit, use it to maintain your professional presence. To monitor your presence online, both private and professional, you can use tools like Google alerts. These will tell you by email when new online content meeting the search criteria that you have entered has been created. Creating a Google alert for your name and location is useful to help you identify what is being said about you, allowing you to either publicise it, or request that it be removed.
Setting up Google alerts is easy. To set one up:
- Google “google alerts”
- Enter your search criteria e.g. jobs resume, job galway, job seeking skills
- Next enter the email address that you want the alerts to be sent to
- Before you click on [Create alerts], click on the “Show options” link. This allows you to set the frequency, sources, language, region and number of results.
- Once you have set up your options, then click on [Create alerts]
To maintain a profession personal brand, it’s really important to monitor all aspects of it. Hopefully, these suggestions will help you take control , but if you have any other suggestions, then I’d really love to hear them. Comment below to share your advice.
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Take care for now
Karen x