Your Name is Your Brand

// August 17th, 2010 // Life, Social Media Marketing, Technology

Search engines, everyone uses them and now people are using them to find you. When you start a new job or project and people first hear your name their first instinct is to look you up online. If someone searched for you online what would they find? For most people the first page is their Facebook account. Other social networks like linked in, twitter, myspace, youtube, formspring, foursquare may also show up. Some people may have personal blogs which will also be featured in the search.

So what do those pages say about you? After all you want to give the right impression to those searching for you. Do your top search results include items which you would prefer to be invisible? With social networking becoming more and more integrated personal information and activities are available online.

To help reduce your visibility online I suggest you adjust your privacy settings on Facebook, only share what is necessary and only to your friends. Also if you have a blog or account with questionable content, then share it using an alias (nickname or different last name). Most blogs also give you the option to turn off search engine crawling, which prevents search engines from indexing your blog. Also search for yourself regularly, don’t wait for something embarassing to pop up before you do something about it. Remember your name is your brand, protect it, once it loses integrity it is hard to reclaim.

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Journey by Dmitri Dawkins