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Online Identity Management: You.com

Mar 10, 09 in Internet, Marketing, Personal, Web/Tech   6 Comments

Somehow or the other I came to be known as a quasi-expert on personal branding.  And with the unemployment rate topping 8% the pace of people coming to me and asking about personal branding has taken quite a spike in the past month of so.  Surprisingly, all of the people that are doing so are currently gainfully employed (those that are not just want job leads, which is a bad strategy).

Also surprising is that they are really coming to ask me about online identity management, which is just one facet of a holistic personal branding effort.  While I may save the broader personal branding discussion for a real expert or a later day, personal branding is essentially the way an individual communicates their unique promise in value in the same manner a company would.  Online identity management focuses on creating a positive and distinguished Web presence of a person on the Internet.

Here are ten steps I recommend to manage your online identity.

1.  Conduct An Vanity Search Audit

Have one of your friends do a vanity search audit (Google, LIve & Yahoo!).  I recently had a meeting with a young lady to discuss managing her online brand.  She was a little surprised I googled her before our meeting.  Even more surprised that I found one of her niche social networking profiles with a reference to drinking and partying.

2. Clean Up Your Debris

If the audit uncovers anything unseemly, pick it up and discard it. 

3.  Control Your Social Network Audiences

Control is not a bad thing.  Close down your more social social network profiles to your real friends.  You don't want people that are searching for you as part of a background check to see comments from your college roommate on Facebook or MySpace.  Maybe that is just me.  Then again, maybe not.

4.  Be You

Cleaning up your debris and making sure some potential hiring company or business partner does not have full access to all your social networks does not mean losing your personality and becoming some sterile drone (discretion is a good quality).  Be nice, be helpful, demonstrate a little expertise, and above all be yourself.  It is the only way that you can be consistent enough to create a brand of you.

5.  Create Home Base

A place where you put all the stuff that you want people to find out about you. It can just be a collection of links to other places to find you on the Web, an online portfolio, a blog, or all of the above.  You can do this on the cheap with tools such as blogger.com but you don't want a cheap personal brand and...

6.  Home is Really Google

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research believes that a company's home page is really google.com. So is your personal home page.  Professionals are googling you. Before they meet you. Before they interview you.  As an example the number one keyword phrase driving traffic to FoG is "Lance Weatherby".  It has the second keyword phrase beat by 100%

In his article Jeremiah points to some research that indicates the top three search results are clicked on 75% of the time.  You want to own those SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and if at all possible you want to dominate the entire default preference of 10 results.  How can you do that?

7.  Register a Personal Domain

I can not think of a single person that I know that has a personal domain that does not have the number one SERP on a vanity search.  Fifty six percent of the people that search for you are going to click on that number one link.  Own it and control you online identity destiny.

8.  Customize Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is purely professional and can be effectively managed as a pillar of your online identity.  Personalize your LinkedIn public profile to the form http://www.linkedin.com/in/lanceweatherby.  It will return better search results.  Instructions for doing so as well as other methods to promote your public profile are here.  To expose your profile to anyone using LinkedIn go to the Edit Public Profile Settings and select Full View.  Make your profile as complete as your resume.

9.  Scribd It

Great place to post your bio, resume and other portfolio materials.  Make sure the files you upload are saved with your full name in the file name.  I put my resume up in January.  It is currently the fifth SERP on my name.

10.  Use Niche Social Media

You can use niche sites to fill out your top SERPS.  ClaimID (which I really like a lot), Naymz, and Rapleaf are all online identity management services that could be utilized.  If you are really active and social online a number of niche sites could fill this void.  Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, you name it.  Just be aware if it is searchable people will search and find it.

And everything else.  To create a positive online identity that highlights your achievements and skills you must actively manage your Web presence.  Hopefully these steps will get you moving down that road.

Comments

Great high-level intro. Only thing I would challenge is the concept of 'privatizing' all online profiles. I used to hold my accounts under lock and key, but found that by opening them up (and obviously clean) that the exposure was of great benefit, at least with LinkedIn that is.

Joe Gallagher   |  Mar 10, 09 at 01:59 PM

Hahaha, a vanity search for my name 'micah wedemeyer' gets my blog as the first hit, but the text that Google pulls isn't exactly flattering.

Still, I like it. It's got personality :)

Micah  |  Mar 11, 09 at 05:16 PM

Good stuff Lance. Thanks for posting. I however am one of the unfortunate ones with a personal domain and can't even get on the first page much less the first result!Crud. Know any resources to help me with that? BTW, your contact link is broken on your site.

Pete Reilly  |  Mar 12, 09 at 06:30 AM

Pete: The curse of the common name. :( You need to keep at it. From what I can tell your blog has only been active for a month or so. Keeping posting as regularly as you can. It will add to your depth of content.

Also you need to do what you can to generate inbound links. According to Technorati http://petereilly.com has no authority. Continue to comment on other blogs of interest and linking to other non top tier blogs within your own articles.

It took well over a year for blog.weatherby.net to become the top SERP for me. Keep at it, persistence pays.

Thanks for the pointer on the broken link. Side effect of the recent retirement of www.weatherby.net

Lance  |  Mar 12, 09 at 07:34 AM

Lance, thanks for the advice and encouragement. It's much appreciated.

Pete  |  Mar 12, 09 at 09:57 PM

Much has been discussed about Identity Theft, user ID's and Passwords stolen or hacked, credit cards being used without the owners knowledge and so on. Now there is a safe way of protecting your passwords and identity online from being copied, stolen and hacked by keyboard trojans, using your biometric fingerprint and face recognition, and even voice, to log on to web sites. By simply scanning your finger or face or voice you can log on to a web site, log on to your computer, and even encrypt files and folders. No more worrying about who might hack into your online accounts or even your email. No more remembering passwords or using the same passwords on many sites. This is an exciting new innovation from myBiodentity and they have about fourteen products that are enabled with biometrics including email encryption, password manager, virtual disk, and many more. You can read more at About Identity Theft and stolen passwords, recently I came across a site that uses Biometrics of finger, face and voice verification so the user just scans to log on. You can read more at http://www.mybiodentity.com

biometric01  |  Mar 31, 09 at 02:57 AM

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