Roy Murphy | Creative Director

Here’s a tag cloud of our reputation management book first chapter. Good to see the words “Reputation” and “Personal” being the most used. Management seems to be further down the pecking order….

Are we nearly there yet? At the risk of sounding like my two year old, well are we? If I can just finish these last pesky edits for our personal reputation management book here, myself and Louis will be shouting from the rooftops…

Our book “Personal Reputation Management” is out shortly, here’s a peek at the front cover. Head over to www.halpernprm.co.uk/prm-book to find out more about ordering and to download a free chapter

Managing your personal reputation can be the difference between getting that job or losing out, gaining that new contract or losing out. You can understand what people are saying about you by using the inherent power of the internet – this is now becoming crucial to personal success – both financially and professionally. Here isa a list of reputation management things you can do now, to get started.

Your reputation is your business. how you are perceived online affects you and your companies image and success. To understand this is to understand the power of perception and to understand how you can positively affect your professional status.

Be consistent. you must convey a similar message across all of your digital profiles if you are a company looking for new clients or customers offer something unique, be personable, offer free advice, trials or products. letting people know what you are about and what you have to offer will begin to develop people who will be your advocates and talk positively about you or your company. these leads to respect, which also leads to recommendation.

Clean up your digital footprint. make a list of all of your social media networks, blogs, websites both company and individual. this means separating out the professonal you from the personal you. make use of privacy settings.

Pick your online profile name and look after it. Even if your name is popular and you cant use “John Smith” across your own website or blog and social media profiles you can try things like “John Smith Designer” to differentiate yourself.

Ask your friends or colleagues to take down any unprofessional pictures, videos or content of you from their flickr, facebook, myspace or twitter accounts.

Make yourself more visible to one of your main target audiences. This means search engines. think about the words that you would describe your professional self. For instance if you are a web developer looking for a new role using words like: dynamic, developer, london based, pro-active on your web spaces can help your visibility also think about your skills and list them on your profiles as major keywords – php, css, aspx, python, javascript etc… use these words in your email signature, on your blog comments or posts on your blog or website

Don’t try and spread your profile across multiple social media networks just because they exist. Use the networks that reflect your personality and your professional objectives.

Monitor your reputation. Set up some simple but effective Google and yahoo alerts for your name or business. You could also check what your competitors are doing using the same technique. Further down the line have a look at products like TrackUR and Reputation Defender to make things easier to manage.

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