Online Brand ReputationManagement: 7 Things CEOs Must Know (Part 2)

Let’s continue from where we left of in the previous post! 

4) Remember: When You’re Online, Your Personal Life Isn’t Personal

 The COVID crisis has turned our living rooms into our offices, and the personal and professional are now more blurred than ever before. The privacy settings of your personal Facebook account may be set to “friends only,” but the blurry-eyed photo of you at your buddy’s bachelor party could be wide open and available to the world.

 

The same goes for your wedding announcement, your name in the church bulletin, your recent political or nonprofit donations, your speeding ticket mentioned in the local paper’s police blotter, or any number of other things. If you have never done an inventory of your online reputation, I suspect you’ll be surprised, and perhaps a bit frightened, by what you find. Which leads us to our next point…

 

5) You Must Control What You Can Control

When it comes to the online environment, there are a number of things you simply can’t control, such as:

• Google’s algorithm that determines which search results show up first

• The fact that someone with the same name as you did something bad

 

But thankfully, there are a number of things you can control that can have a positive impact on your overall online brand reputation management.

 

For example, imagine that another “Sameer Somal” was convicted of stealing 100 bags of potato chips from a local supermarket, and when people Googled my name, the top results that came up kept leading them to reports of this awful situation. Not good! One of the first things I’d do is immediately start adding my middle initial to everything I did and every account I had, from the byline on this blog post, to my LinkedIn profile, to my email signature. All to help differentiate myself from the chip-stealing Sameer. I may even go so far as to write a post on this blog about the situation.

 

If something like this happened to you, I’d recommend bulking up all of the “owned” profiles you control—on your own website, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook profile, your Twitter account—with unique, updated content so that the search engines have a reason to visit and index that content more often. The name of the game here is to differentiate yourself and make your various profiles as attractive as possible to search engines.

 

6) Continually Monitor Your Online Presence

Earlier, I talked about the importance of creating an inventory of your online brand. But just as in your real life, online brand reputation management and your digital presence evolve constantly. So if you want an updated snapshot of your brand reputation you must monitor your online presence continuously. Certainly, you could just Google yourself daily, but I’m guessing like most execs your time is limited. Thankfully, there are a handful of tools that can help automate the process. Here are a few that I like:

Google Alerts: The grandfather of all alerts tools, at a minimum you should be running Google Alerts on your own name to stay abreast of information about you that pops up online. If you do nothing else, ensure you do at least this.

Brand 24: This monitoring tool searches across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more. It includes sentiment analysis so you have a sense of if the conversation about you is good, bad, or indifferent.

Mention: Another great monitoring tool, Mention searches among press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs, along with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

 

7) Consider Working with an Expert Sooner Rather Than Later

Certainly, as a CEO you have a vested interest in doing some online brand reputation management. But as we’ve seen, there’s a lot of work that goes into making that happen. From performing an exhaustive inventory to get a baseline of where your reputation currently stands to identify areas within and beyond your control and monitoring for potential threats, doing a good online brand reputation management can take a lot of time and effort.

 

That’s why many CEOs choose to invest in expert assistance. Working with an experienced online brand reputation management firm means that you can focus your energy on your business, and let your online brand reputation management team handle the tedious day-to-day tasks associated with online brand reputation management.

 

An Investment In Your Sanity and Your Business

Your personal online brand reputation management can impact your business and your bottom line, so it’s imperative, as an executive, to take control of your online brand reputation management. Consider working with an experienced online reputation management firm to help streamline the online reputation inventory, monitoring, and management process. If you’re like many busy executives, it’s a worthy investment in both your sanity and your business

Originally published on Blue Ocean Global Technology.