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5 Ways to Avoid Ruining Your Online Image

Your brand is sacred. It is also the lifeline that runs your business and keeps your contacts close.

However, managing your online presence poorly can SABOTAGE the very brand you worked so hard for - in seconds!

The Internet is where first impressions occur long before in-person handshakes are made, therefore managing your image online has never been more important.

Social media expert Dan Schwarbel offers five ways to protect personal brands against online attacks.

1. Pay attention to mentions about your brands.

Did you know that 58% of Americans don’t even Google themselves?

As you create your personal brand on a variety of platforms, your name will start popping up in search engines and on social networks. This can be both beneficial to your brand or harmful depending on the context. Unfortunately, negative mentions generally spread like wild fire.

Set up a Google alert for your name, your company's name, key competitors, and partners. Stay current on what's being said about you and your industry. You can also try Social Mention for a more complete solution to brand mentions on social networks.

2. Choose your networks wisely.

Don't spread yourself too thin by participating in every social network on the Internet. This can hurt your brand because you'll find it hard to update all of your social profiles and discussions regularly.

Join only the largest social networks - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn - as well as those networks in your industry. Then update them often!

3. Know your audience.

Be selective about who you invite into your network.  The second you add your manager or colleagues is the time when you have to rethink what you publish or what you syndicate from other social networks.

On Facebook, consider having a profile page for your inner circle of friends and family and then a Facebook Fan Page for your professional image.  This way, you can make your profile private and hide it from search, while having a fan page that you can point your coworkers to.

4. Keep self-promotion to a minimum.

Successful self-promotion only works in moderation, because if you’re constantly only promoting yourself, many people will unfollow, unfriend, or block you from their network.

The best way to build a strong personal brand is to promote other people, which creates goodwill and a connection, as well as distributing value based on what you have to offer: Your expertise.

If you’re helping people 80 or 90% of the time, then people will be much more accepting of your self-promotional messages the other 10%. You will also start to notice that other people will promote you — and their endorsement is even stronger than your own proclamations.

5. Be consistent.

Selecting a unified “picture” and spreading it across all your social media — your website, your blog, your presentations, your press kits, your business cards, etc. — will build image recognition in the mind of your audience. Consistency is significant for pictures, your name, as well as the fonts, the colors and the overall message that you communicate through your online properties.

Building a good personal brand is only half the battle. You also have to manage it.

Get in tune with what's being said about you on the Internet.

Save your image from self-sabotage!