IF YOU DO NOT SHOW UP ON
GOOGLE DO YOU REALLY EXIST?
Why having an online presence is critical to business and career success.
It is 10 years since Tom Peters first wrote about the concept of
personal branding in his Fast Company article “The Brand Called You”
and only now are we starting to realize and embrace the importance of
branding for ourselves – identifying and communicating our differences
to stand out, get noticed and secure that deal or be hired for that next great
project.
Much the same as branding is no longer just for the large corporations
like Nike or Coca-Cola the same applies to having a presence on the
web. You can be assured that as you use the web for research that your
business contacts and prospects are checking you out online by Googling you
and it is critical to know what is being said or not being said about you.
A survey of executives by Execunet reveals that while the vast
majority (82%) expect companies and recruiters to enter their name
into a search engine during the course of their next job search, one-in-
three (33%) have never actually conducted a search of their own
name to determine what information about their personal or
professional lives exists online.
This is more than just ‘ego-surfing’ to see if you even exist, other
surveys have identified that significant numbers of business people are
using search engines like Google as one of the first steps in gathering
perceptions and knowledge about people that they want to do business
with and it’s imperative that you come up in those searches if you want
to get ahead and not be left behind.
A survey, conducted by Harris Interactive for search engine Dogpile,
said about 23 percent of adult Internet users in the United States have
searched online for their clients or customers, workers or potential employees,
and supervisors or prospective managers
So where should you start?
Firstly it’s a good idea to get a baseline of where your online identity is
now. That can be done quickly by looking at your ‘Google score’ and
seeing how many hits you have on your name, if it’s a common one
then it might take a little more work in sorting through which one’s are
yours. If you have no online identity or very little that is okay, its
something that can quite quickly be built upon, but if there is digital
dirt out there on you then that’s a whole different story.
In an Execunet recruiter survey of those who use sites such as
Google and Yahoo! to check the background of job seekers, 35% have
eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information
uncovered online – up significantly from 26% just one year ago.
You will need to be working a little harder in ensuring the positive
online identity items start to come up above those carrying the digital
dirt, but websites such as Zoominfo, LinkedIn and Ziggs can start to help get
you on track.
Once you know what your baseline is then it’s a good idea to spend
some time in uncovering and developing what your online identity
should be saying about you. Personal branding works well for you
because it’s all about identifying and leveraging your unique abilities,
allowing you to be yourself and maximizing what you are naturally
good at.
You should be looking to do some introspective work in this area but
also taking the time to gather some external perceptions about who
you are from colleagues, friends, managers and even clients. Also you
must identify your target audience, who needs to know about you so
that you can start to attain those goals you have set yourself.
With all of this information collected you can now define your brand
statement – that 15 or so words that grabs your audiences attention.
Then ensure that this statement is consistently used across all aspects
of your online and offline identity, it needs to become an integral part
of your profile so that people start to recall and describe you in that
same way.
How do you start to build an online identity?
You can begin building your online identity now by posting your profile
on the likes of Zoominfo, LinkedIn and Ziggs as a start, or find other
more relevant social network sites that you know your target audience
are using.
But none of us have unlimited budgets or time to start doing all the
things that global brands do, nor do we have to. Communicating your
brand online narrowly will increase the likelihood that you start to get
noticed by the people who matter – your target audience. The key is
to stand out from others who may have a similar position in your
industry or marketplace – you need to differentiate and stand out as
an expert in one or two areas, not try to be something for everyone.
A blog is one of the best and fastest ways to get an online identity
built and it does not take more technical know how than being able to
use any word processing software and entry costs for a blog are
extremely low but still can provide a professional look and feel.
The challenge with web sites as an alternative is that they can take a
lot more time and money to establish and then updating and
maintenance can be either technically challenging or keep adding to
your costs.
Blogs meanwhile can also help you to build relationships with your
readers because they are set up to be two way conversations. They
give you the advantage of mass exposure but still allow direct one to
one contact and dialogue.
Also you can start to track other blogs that are relevant to your area of
expertise and start to post comments that add value to their
conversations. Each time you post something this all helps in raising
your Google ranking.
What else can you be doing?
For those of you in professional organizations or associations many
have online forums where you can contribute advice to questions
posed and in turn again raise your profile.
And if there are books that you have read that are again relevant to
your target audience go to Chapters or Amazon online and post a book
review – again this raises your Google ranking.
But a word of caution – remember that whatever you post on line is
available for the world to see. There have already been some high
profile cases of business people being exposed for either fictitious
claims or worse and then there are always those photos or videos of
your doing something that you probably did not want many others to
know about. The best advice is that before you put anything out there
online would you be happy to see it appearing on the front page of
your local newspaper? – it’s a good test.
Branding with results
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