This post was originally published by Jeb Blount over at the Sales Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Getting the Job Done. I wanted to share it with you all here because it is an excellent post and expands on the Building Your Personal Brand in the New Sales Economy story Jeb and I shared with you last week. As you read this post think hard about the ways you can build your personal brand with social media to gain an edge in a very competitive B2B sales marketplace.
What do people find when they Google you?
In today’s world where virtually anyone can find anything about you with a few clicks of a mouse, it is vital that you manage your professional presence online.
A good friend of mine had a rather embarrassing experience. He’d used a connection to get his son an interview at a top company. His son passed the interviews with flying colors and they offered him the job verbally. But before the written offer was sent, the hiring manager did a search online and found some college pictures of his son smoking pot. The pictures had been posted by a college buddy but that didn’t matter. The offer was withdrawn.
These days anyone, anywhere at any time can find out all kinds of things about you with a few clicks of the mouse. You can be sure that your employer, business partners, and savvy prospects and customers are doing research to find out more about you. Do you know what they might find? When was the last time you “Googled” yourself? We live in the age of transparency. With advent of search engines and social networking you are pretty much going to have to get used to the fact that you are an open book.
Your online presence plays a key role in how others perceive you and if you ignore it, it will be at your own peril. It is critical that you control what people find when they search for you on the web. Yes, there are some things you cannot control but all you really need to do is control the first two or three pages on Google. Recent studies have shown that fewer than 8% of people go past the third page. You want to be sure that when people search for you they find things that support your professional image.
Every professional should set up a personal website or blog that includes a bio, accomplishments, education, certificates, a professional photo and articles you have written. Jill Konrath offers excellent tips for this in her new book, Get Back To Work Faster.
You should also have a profile on LinkedIn that includes a short bio, your work history, education, and professional photo. Ensure that your profile reflects the professional image you wish to portray. Enable your profile to be visible to search engines. This way, when people use search engines to find information on you, your LinkedIn profile will be among the first things they find.
Be sure your profiles and content on other important social networking sites like Facebook, SalesGravy.com, Plaxo and Twitter jive with the profession image you want others to see. Be very careful what you post because these days the search engines are indexing the content on these sites in real time.
If there are pictures or other items on the web that are damaging to your professional image do your best to get them removed. Note though that any information you pull off will be cached so there is no way to completely remove the evidence that you partied like an animal in college. What you can do though is make it harder to find.
Finally, set up Goolge Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you online. The tool is free and easy to set up.
Managing your online presence online requires vigilance and an investment of time. But it is absolutely vital that you start. Increasingly you will be judged by what people see and read about you online which is something you should never leave to chance.
To subscribe to the New Sales Economy Blog click here.
Related posts:
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Good stuff Chad. Being a business owner and being so involved in Sales/Marketing, I've spent significant time trying to 'brand' my name in the search engines….Another point to add to your article is that businesses now have the opportunity to do this same identity search on Google to their customers as their customers/clients/prospects are doing to them. There have been more than one case where I walked away from a potential client because I didn't like what I was seeing….Keep up the good work.