How often do you ‘Google’ yourself? According to CAREEREALISM.com, 88% of employers will Google your name to see more about you. And with over 230 million Internet users in the United States, it’s easy to be mistaken for another professional who is building their own online brand.
However, there are ways to manage those inaccurate results and increase your brand’s reputation:
Your Social Media is Showing!
First and foremost, make sure that you look good on all of your social media accounts. Review your activity, privacy settings and photos — you don’t want a tagged photo or friend’s wall comment to cost you the ideal internship.
CAREERALISM.com suggests you should have your LinkedIn profile 100% complete and take down or change any comments that reflect poorly upon you in Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and any other online account – reputation management is an important aspect of any student, professional, or company’s online brand. Instead of all-fun-all-the-time, use your own blog, online exchanges, and testimonials to showcase your professional knowledge.
Score, Grade & Measure Yourself Online
Evaluating your online brand is a great way to determine your importance or relevance to a search engine, or an employer’s brand. Once you gauge your presence and influence, you should continue to monitor these results for optimal brand management.
Here are some great tools on evaluating your online brand by Kristen Jacoway, the founder of Career Design Coach, from her recent article, Do You See What I See?:
- Online ID Calculator: The online identity calculator was developed by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson who wrote Career Distinction. You will enter some data about yourself plus the results you receive when you Google your name. The calculator will score this information and rank you as Digitally Disguised, Digitally Dissed (means you have unfavorable results), Digitally Dabbling, and Digitally Distinct.
- Addictomatic: You can search many different types of platforms to get a clearer picture of what the Internet says about you. Addictomatic shows tweets, posts through FriendFeed, videos on YouTube, Truveo Video Search, blogs, Wikio, Bing, Yahoo, Flickr, and more.
- Klout: Klout is becoming a standard to measure your social influence online. Scores range from 1 to 100 using more than 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure the following factors: True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
Here are a few of my favorite online evaluation tools:
- Grader: This free tool, powered by Hubspot, measures the power, authority and reach of a Twitter or Facebook user, blogger or press release.
- My Web Career: This tool enables you to discover and evaluate online data that may help or harm your career prospects. It also provides you with a Career Score, which is a numerical representation of the strength of your online career brand. Similar to your credit score, where your financial behavior determines your score, your Career Score is based on an evaluation of your online behavior.
- Google Alerts: This tool allows you to set up e-mail alerts for any topic you wish to monitor. Just enter your name in the search bar and then you’re just a click away from any mention of your name online.
Direction, Direction, Direction — Use an Online Map
Managing an online brand can be a lot of work, but if you have some visibility on the web, you can consolidate those results with one easy Google-geared link. Vizibility created the world’s first SearchMe Button for Google that helps returns the search results you want others to see first.
No matter your strategy or current image, it’s always important to seek a professional opinion – remember that an expert, like our founder & president Heather R. Huhman, is only a phone call or e-mail away.
The time you spend working away at building your image can easily cut into your job search, internship, or homework time, so consider services like iMarketYourCareer, which offers a specific job search plan for you and your career goals, tips and techniques for networking online and offline (including people you should start connecting with), recognition on our social networking sites, a blog post promoting and more.
Tell us: What are you doing to promote and manage your online brand? And do you need any help?
