When is personal branding bad? When it casts a negative impression of you to employers. There are some people with Facebook pages that have pictures and content that some potential employers will not look favorably upon. There may be an old myspace.com profile or even an old linkedin profile that casts you in a bad light.
There may even be blog posts that include you as a topic of discussion that you may rather not have associated with your name and that’s not a good thing for personal branding.
Bad Personal Branding Example
I still have a web site that is dedicated to an annual card game we play. The winner gets their picture included as champion and I usually include some other embarrassing pictures and descriptions that our group finds quite humorous but potential employers or clients may frown upon.
One gentleman had a couple too many cocktails and we took some pictures of him in his “happy” state. Nothing terrible or scandalous but you could tell he had a couple too many libations. I posted the pictures on the site and we all got a laugh. He barely remembered what happened that evening so he got to see what happened. However, I did get a frantic call from him a couple days later asking me to take the picture down. He was an investment advisor and did not want that picture of him to be showing up if anybody Googled him. He was worried about his Personal branding.
I removed the picture to make him feel better but I was wayyyyy ahead of him. When I created the site, I made the site so it would not be indexed by any of the search engines and I was careful to not link to the site from anywhere else. The only way to get there was to manually type in the site address. You had to know how to get there. However, not everybody that has a web site or blog may be that concerned with privacy.
Where to start your own personal branding investigation?
The first thing to do is go to yahoo and Google and search for your name. Go into Facebook and search for your name. You will probably end up with one of three scenarios:
You don’t find much at all or what you do find about yourself is just fine left out there. Things like family pictures or you winning a humanitarian award are good things.
You find some thing(s) that you would rather not have posted. In this case, contact the person posting the item and ask/beg/plead for them to remove the content or images. Explain the situation and in most cases the person posting the items will agree to remove the offending item(s). If not, legal action may be needed. In this case, start with a cease and desist letter. That almost always will get the content removed and quickly.
You find some things that could be considered offensive but it’s not about you. Someone else may have the same name as you and there is a picture with your common name associated with it but you may not be able to for sure identify that it’s not you. You have a couple options. First is to explain the situation to the owner of the page. Maybe they will remove it. If not, at least you know it’s there and if anybody asks you about it, you very quickly have an answer as to why it is not you in the picture.
Remember that with social media being so prevalent that it’s not just a matter of you putting pictures about yourself on the web for all to see. Other people can easily do it without your consent or knowledge.
Google Alerts and Personal Branding
Once you have done the initial research on yourself, you will want to keep abreast of any new updates. Google Alerts does a fantastic job of notifying you when your name is added to the web and Google finds it.
Quite simply, when a phrase such as “Jeff Pohl” is added to a web page, I have Google alerts set up to email me the URL of where it was added. It may take anywhere from a couple minutes to a couple months for the data to be found by Google and the email sent along to me. However, I will know about my name being added (like I did above) as soon as Google knows about it.
For more information about the mechanics of setting up Google Alerts, go to my article about it at XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Follow those directions and you will be well on your way to monitoring your own personal branding.