Okay, so you are comfortable with getting your personal brand out there on the web. But periodically you are going to have to monitor, prune and synchronize it to keep it fresh. Here are a few tips for keeping your personal brand clean, organized and synchronized.
Monitor
Tons have been written about monitoring technologies for brands and here is a good list of them all – 170 Resources to help you manage your online reputation. I tend to use a combination of Technorati alerts on my name and blog name sent directly to a special folder in my Google RSS reader. Plus I also use Tweetscan for twitter mentions and Samepoint for comment mentions all sent directly to a personal brand folder in my Google RSS Reader. Bottom line find something that works for you and stick with it.
Organize
Listening is really the easy part, organizing your brand and more complicated. Like any brand you want to be known for something. So making sure that your single message and point of view is coming through on all sites your brand is on is critical.
I syndicate my blog to 10 sites and get picked up my a dozen or so more. You have to be sure you bio, headshot, key message and look and feel of your brand is perfect across all these channels. I have a quarterly reminder on my outlook calendar for the first Saturday of every quarter – to visit all these sites and see how my brand is coming across.
Tip: When you do this please be sure you don’t just go through the motions – really think like a person who is unfamiliar with your brand and then look for ways to improve on all of these sites.
Synchronize
Here is one that is new for me and is well worth the time. I am sure you have been growing your personal brand onplaces like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo – but have you synchronized all of them to ensure you are getting the biggest benefit from all of them?
Here is how. Assuming you have assembled all your email addresses into one central location like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail – you can then export them to a file and import it into Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo looking for people who you haven’t connected with yet.
I did this recently and found tons of people I was connected with on LinkedIn but not Twitter or Friendfeed and vice versa. Hat tip goes out to Christopher Penn to pointing this out on a recent podcast of Marketing over Coffee. In fact they even wrote a 19 page eBook about the topic.
