Guest Post: Dan Schawbel on Reputation Management

Today, a guest post on reputation management from Dan Schawbel, Gen-Y brand management machine. Actually, Fast Co has called him a "personal branding force of nature," which is arguably even better. Lots of great stuff to be found on his Personal Branding Blog.

Five Free Tools for Personal Reputation Management
By Dan Schawbel

So what is “reputation management”?

Reputation management means tracking your personal brand both online and offline and reacting when necessary. 

A lot of people think that personal branding is synonymous with reputation management, but I like to position it as routine maintenance, after you’ve already established yourself.  On the web, reputation management means monitoring and potentially interacting with sites and users that have cited your brand name. Offline, reputation management means assessing the success or failure of your brand by seeking feedback from your network.

Reputation management is mandatory these days for career development and personal brand management. The general public is generating content like crazy. There are over 80 million YouTube videos, over 110 million blogs and over 230 million profiles on the largest social networks (Facebook & MySpace).  Content that is created on one website can travel to others and people can comment on you instantaneously.  Do you know what people are saying about you?

Below are my Top 5 recommended tools for your personal reputation management – all free! 

1.    Google - Google.com/alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe through email and RSS readers.  PR agencies often use alerts to track their campaigns.  You can monitor a news story, keep current with your industry and competitors, and see who is writing about you.

2.    Blog posts – Technorati.com

If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world.  Technorati tracks “blog reactions” or blogs that link to yours, upon registration.  Search for your name on Technorati and subscribe to RSS alerts. Then when someone blogs about you, you’ll be notified.

3.    Blog comments – backtype.com

Recently, a new service came out to solve the problem of how to monitor blog comments.  Think about it: If you’re only tracking posts, not comments, you could really be missing out on a lot of chatter about your brand. BackType is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you.

4.    Discussion boards - boardtracker.com
Discussion boards are yet another channel where people can gather in a community and talk about YOU.  Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information they viewed on them.  Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.

5.    Twitter – search.twitter.com
Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light and if you don’t catch them, they’ll spread like a virus.  Using Twitter search you can locate any instances of your name and either tweet back or remain silent. 

All five of these free tools can be used to monitor your company’s brand name as well.  If you aren’t taking care of your online reputation, others will.  It’s time to find out what people are saying and do something about it. 

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He authors the Personal Branding Blog and publishes Personal Branding Magazine. Dan's upcoming book is called  Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, Spring 2009).