We have talked on this blog many times about the importance of developing a personal brand. And it is still true. But one thing that is very important once you have developed your brand is to protect it. Because you are a nice person, it may not have occurred to you that there are people who would want to discredit or misuse your brand. You may think that only really famous people have to worry about people who might try to impersonate them, but you would be wrong. It happens all the time. Often, it is simply a spammer or someone who wants to mislead people into buying their product or visiting their website. Other times, it can simply be someone who wants to make a name for themselves in your field and has mistakenly taken your name or brand. So, how can you protect your brand integrity?
Here are 5 tips to help you protect your personal brand:
- Set up a Google Alert for your brand- Google Alerts are easy and quick and can help you tremendously. How it works is that you put in the terms you want to monitor on the web and Google will email you to let you know any time they index new pages that contain these terms. Set up the Alert for your brand name and investigate any time you receive an alert.
- Search Twitter frequently- Once a week or even once a month, it is a good idea to search Twitter for your brand name. This will let you find out if anyone else is using your name on Twitter or something close to it. If you find that this happened, contact Twitter and they will delete the user's account if you provide proof of your identity.
- Consider creating an email signature- Adjust your email settings to add a signature to each of your outgoing emails. The signature should be a catchy slogan or something of the like. This will get your email contacts used to seeing the signature and provide you with a sort of authentication measure. If someone were to send out emails to your contacts that were allegedly from you, hopefully some of the people in your contacts would wonder if it was really from you, due to the slightly different email address and lack of signature.
- Create a good relationship with your professional network- Building a strong, active professional network is good both for your career and to prevent misuse of your brand. If someone were looking for potential targets, they would try to find people who aren't very active with their contacts.
- Keep an eye on your industry- Even if someone wasn't using your exact brand name, they could be using your information or any content you may post online. By keeping up to date with what is going on in your industry, you raise the odds that you would run across anyone who was misusing your content.
If you find that someone is using your information, name or content without your permission, it is very important that you contact the website or social network provider to have the user deleted. Protecting your brand is your responsibility, so don't be afraid to defend it when you have to.
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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