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Maximise Your Online Visibility
The Five Things You Must Know About Your Online Reputation
Number One: People Can Find You Online
What can people find out about you on the internet? Your work history? Your high school volleyball results? Perhaps they can see what football team you support or what you and your family do on weekends. The likelihood is that people can see a lot more about your life than you probably think.
It is no secret that online privacy is a thing of the past. ‘Gone viral’, a term used to describe the mass perpetuation of a piece of media across the internet, is the buzz word now. The truth is that once a piece of information has been released on the internet, no matter how small and insignificant it may be, it will be there for good.
A reputation can now be made on the internet. It can also be broken. For the last few years, keeping in touch with your family and friends has been easy. Keeping tabs on what is going on has been very simple. This phenomenon is now expanding. Your work colleagues, employer and clients are now able to trace exactly what you do in your personal and professional life, as too can your potential clients and employers.
Of course, social media is the main vehicle for public information on private citizens. No matter how high you may have your privacy settings, it seems inevitable that photos and information about you is going to reach the outside world. A Google search on practically any person will show some kind of result. If you have contributed to a journal, spoken at a conference, won a professional award or got a promotion its likely there is a record of it online somewhere. As to are the cricket scores from the local team you play for, the angry ‘Letter to the Editor’ you wrote six years ago and the fact that you won a meat tray at a trivia night last year. Personal and professional, important and trivial; Google knows it all.
This is of course something that can work for or against you. For those in business, reputation is everything. More and more potential customers and clients are doing their online research regarding companies, their employees as well as individuals before they commit to a purchase or contract. Being in control of your online reputation can go along way to increasing your success.
Number Two: You Can Maximise Your Online visibility for Good Instead of Evil
Many of us have experienced a massive social media mishap. If you are a member of these sites it is likely you have had to fend off one or two inappropriate comments or tagged photos that you would rather your Grandma/boss/girlfriend didn’t see. However social media, and other online outlets, are being used by more than just your nosey Aunt Audrey to see what you are up to.
Potential employers can and will look you up to find out about the real you. You may look great on paper, present perfectly in an interview, but if your MySpace heading reads about a life of hard partying and late nights you probably won’t land the job. Of course, we all have a right to our private lives, and any decent company is going to overlook a few ‘unprofessional’ photos. Put yourself in an employers shoes for one moment. You have two employees that are nose and nose for a promotion. A search on one shows a few family photos, a love of soccer and an appearance at a charity auction. The second shows photos of big nights out and crude and rude comments between mates. Which one are you going to promote?
This extends to companies as well as individuals. The internet has become one great big public forum. It is filled to the brim with reviews, opinions and information about all kinds of companies and businesses, yours included. In the past if Mrs. Smith didn’t like the plumber she called out she would spread the word to a few friends and neighbors. Now she can spread the word to a few hundred thousand people without leaving her living room.
Rest assured, you are not entirely at the mercy of disgruntled customers and huge nights out on the town. With the right strategies you can successfully manage your online presence to attract new opportunity.
As an individual, the first step is to separate the personal your from the professional you. Many people now run two separate accounts on social media sites. Keep your personal profile private, this means no one can find you in search results, you simply find them. Better yet, put it under a different name. You are then free to communicate with your friends as you normally would. On your professional profile you may like to list your education, work history and career achievements. This is a good place to keep in contact with past or current colleagues.
Social media is also a good way to keep in contact with your previous clients. The first benefit of this is that you and your company stay fresh in their mind. If you change companies but stay within the same industry you have a great list of contacts to take with you. You can even take this one step further by promoting yourself and your products online. Offering information, special offers and customer service via social media is a great way to not only service your current clients but to get in contact with new ones.
Many are using their public presence to attract new opportunities. Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn work as a kind of Facebook that is purely for professional lives. You can list your accomplishments, link up with colleagues and network with others in your industry. Many employers now use these sites to headhunt for potential new employees.
Utilising the internet at large you can create a global reputation for yourself. Writing for online journals and blogs can help present you as an expert in your industry. There are many opportunities to make contribution to the websites of others, with webmasters constantly on the lookout for fresh content. Better yet, creating your own industry blog or website is not only a great way to get your name out there, but to also show your own expertise.
Number Three: The Best Reputations are Built With Careful Strategy
There are plenty of ways to get your name out there on the internet. However, bad content and the wrong channels can do you more harm than good. Good reputation building takes forethought, take out some time to plan a strategy as to how you are going to build yours.
You can define your online reputation by taking a series of strategic steps. With the right tools and planning you can have your details available to a wide target audience. You can also control and manage what information they are able to access about you.
The first thing to do is find out which social media outlets are right for you. This will depend on your circumstances and the kind of business you are in. You then need to figure out what kind of information you do, and just as importantly do not, want the public to be able to find.
Your online presence is not just useful in terms of creating opportunity. You can also monitor and manage your reputation online with crisis management strategies. Not all publicity is in fact good publicity, with the right techniques and know-how you can combat bad press or simply a bad reputation.
Search engines too are an integral part of a good online persona. You may be appearing on Google, but if you are not on the first page its likely that potential customers wont find you. Its also important that customers may be searching many different terms when using search engines. While you may appear on a high ranking for a search for your company name, your ranking may be poor for more commonly used search terms.
Increasing your internet presence not only means that customers are more likely to find positive information about your and your company, but they are more likely to find you full stop. The more good information out there on the internet, the higher your rankings.