Are You Listening for Your Personal Brand?

We’ve talked about how easy it is to create digital dirt, but are you “listening” to make sure that your personal brand isn’t tarnished? I’m going to talk about three free tools you can use to monitor your own name, and if you have one, your company’s
name.

1) Google Alerts – make sure to set up Google Alerts to email you when your name or your company name is used. The best way to create these alerts for clean results is to put your name or company name in quotation marks (i.e. “Career Design Coach”). If I don’t put “Career Design Coach” in quotation marks, then I get results that include career, design, and coach. So, the information is not useful to me. By using quotation marks, I’ll only get results for my full name and for the full name of my company.

2) Tweetbeep - Tweetbeep will send you email updates when someone mentions you or your company’s name and even who’s tweeting your website or blog (even if they use shortened URL services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com).

3) Company Buzz (LinkedIn application) – Company Buzz lets you “listen” to tweets about your company on Twitter. You can use it to find relevant trends and comments about your company. You can access historical charts to track the buzz and see trends emerge by seeing the top words associated with your topic and see the related tweets.

If you aren’t monitoring your personal brand on social media, it could be a costly mistake. With so many employers, recruiters, and hiring managers utilizing a Google search prior to engaging with a candidate, your online digital print is something you want to monitor continually. Algorithms change and it’s necessary to set aside time to Google yourself on a weekly basis to make sure that the first three pages of results consistently paint your personal brand story in a positive light.