The first three posts in this series, explored how you can begin creating your personal brand through having a few great brainstorm sessions, organizing your thoughts by creating a web diagram, showed you how to create your own self-hosted blog with some great how-to videos and then gave some tips on how to promote your personal brand.
This week’s post will give some quick tips on how you can monitor your personal brand and see the conversations taking place about you on the web.
Monitor the conversations
First, it’s important to understand that conversations are taking place all over the web. Everyday, millions of people read blogs, comment on them, write their own blog posts, tweet about content on Twitter, post links on Facebook and update their status. What is being said about you on the web is important because it helps to build or break down your personal brand. If you don’t know the conversations taking place about you on the web, you’re flying in the dark and missing out on critical information.
If you don’t know what’s being said about you on the web don’t fret. Remember, creating your personal brand is a process that you should continuously strive to improve. Monitoring your personal brand is just the next step in your brand’s evolution.
Two great personal brand monitoring tools
Google Alert: Allows you to set up an alert for any search term you desire. Make sure you set up a Google alert for your name. You will then be able to see anything that is said about you on the web. If you have a popular name, it’s even more important to begin building your personal brand so Google can start to index you and push you up its page rankings.
Twitter Search: Allows you to set up an alert for any search term you desire on Twitter. Again, make sure you set up an Twitter alert for your name. Now you will be notified anytime somebody tweets about your name or any other search term you’re interested in. If your going to monitor your name on Twitter make sure you add the @ in front of your account name.
From using these two monitoring tools, you will be able to see the conversations taking place about you on the web and in social networks. You can reach out to people who share the same interests or who like your work. You can also counter anything harmful being said about you that could have a negative impact on your personal brand. The key is that you will be in the know and have access to vital information to promote and protect your personal brand.
This is the last post in How To Create Your Personal Brand series and I hope you’ve found them helpful! For some more in depth tips on this series I highly recommend you read Dan’s new book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Personal Brand to Achieve Career Success.
Next week, I will take a look out how the power of positive thinking can help build your personal brand.
