Chapter 7

Facing Your Online Reputation

In This Chapter

Assessing your online reputation

Figuring out what to do if your reputation is bad (or nonexistent)

Keeping a spotless online reputation throughout your career

When someone conducts a Google search of your name, the information that surfaces about you makes up your online reputation. These artifacts can be articles written by or about you, photos or videos of you, or online profiles of people with your name. Even unwanted pictures of you from Facebook may pop up (think last year’s Halloween party).

Your online reputation is particularly critical when searching for a job in today’s market. Why? Because hiring managers are going to Google you. Both large and small companies research candidates online before a job interview; indeed, Googling prospective hires is part of today’s standard operating procedure.

Have you ever Googled yourself? If you have, you may know how misleading the results can be. Imagine a potential hiring manager Googling you and forming an opinion based on seeing your very tight Catwoman costume. Scary, isn’t it? Some people feel helpless in the face of this challenge and are willing to let Google’s search algorithm determine their employment viability.

But you don’t have to be one of them. With the information I provide in this chapter, you can better control what people find out about you through Google or any other search engine. No longer will you be at the mercy of the robots. Instead, you’ll be the master of your own destiny (and your online reputation!).

You can’t tell Google what to display for search results, but you can feed it more content to consider. This process doesn’t happen overnight. This chapter describes a long-term, career-long initiative.

Reviewing Your Online Reputation

Before you begin to build up your online reputation, you need to know just how much work to put into it. Consider this first part reputation triage. You determine what your current reputation is, and then you align it to your priorities. For example, when you search for your name, you quickly discover how many folks share your moniker. The problem with this name-sharing business is that your prospective employer won’t always know who you are. She’ll just know that a convicted felon gynecologist lawyer from New York may be looking for a job with her. Building your online reputation is the answer.

I started seriously working on my online reputation about two years ago when I randomly searched my name and found that I was a New York lawyer, a gynecologist, and a convicted felon. The only accurate result that came up was on the third page about the spring dance concert at Brown University. (No, I didn’t wear tights and dance around the stage. I was the technical director!) Clearly, these results weren’t going to help my career. However, knowing how much I needed to work on my online reputation helped me pace myself when I began reclaiming my name.

You may be tempted to skip ahead to the later section about building up your online reputation, but I encourage you to read through this section first and follow the steps I outline to assess your reputation — no matter how painful it may be to see misleading information about yourself.

Is your reputation sick or healthy?

The most obvious way of assessing where your reputation stands is to simply step into the shoes of a potential hiring manager and Google yourself. When you do so, count how many times an accurate link to you appears in the results in the first three pages.

One of three things happens when you Google yourself:

Information about other people with your name appears; info about the real you doesn’t appear at all.

Nothing related to anyone with your name appears.

Bits and pieces about the real you show up.

If information about the real you shows up more than three times on Google’s first page and you like those results, your reputation has a temperature of 98.6 degrees — pretty healthy. Chances are, however, that good information about you won’t be so apparent in your search results, which means you have some work to do.

Try putting quotation marks around your name to get more accurate results. This tactic tells Google that you want results that contain both your first and last name and in that order. Savvy hiring managers know this trick as well, so you can bet they’re searching for you in this way. Also vary your search based on a middle name or just the initial. Try seeing whether you can narrow your search results by adding qualifiers like the city or state you live in or a previous job title. The point is to think like a hiring manager who’s trying to learn more about you. Based on your résumé, what information may the hiring manager try to use to narrow his search?

If you’ve ever changed your name, consider that each new piece of content you produce will have the new name. So if you want hiring managers to see some of the old results, you may mention your old, or maiden, name on your résumé. Doing so is a clue for them if they want to dig deeper. If you don’t want them to find you with your old name, simply leave it out of your application.

The following list details three additional ways of quickly assessing your online reputation:

Try the Google Grader. The free Google Grader tool available at BrandYourself (http://brandyourself.com) is a great way to find out the status of your online reputation. After signing up for a free account, you enter your name, and the program provides a page of Google search results. You choose the results that apply to you and then click the Grade Me button. Not surprisingly, given the name, Google Grader then gives your reputation a letter grade. (The Syracuse University–educated creators of this tool must have very high standards because even though I dominate my Google results, I've never been able to get higher than a B+ with their system!)

Use the Online ID Calculator. Developed by Reach Personal Branding, the Online ID Calculator (www.onlineidcalculator.com) offers more than just a letter grade; it tells you where you may be deficient and offers some practical suggestions for fixing it. However, the process takes a while, and the user interface hasn't been updated in years.

After you log in (signing up is free, but you must provide your first name, an e-mail address, and some basic demographic information), the calculator asks you to manually Google your name and enter the results into the form. Depending on the information you enter, the program places you somewhere in a matrix of four possibilities: Dissed, Disastrous, Dabbling, or Distinct.

Check out MyWebCareer. The newest and most advanced tool for figuring out your online reputation, MyWebCareer (www.mywebcareer.com) offers a fully automated reputation score based on your current social media profiles and Google rank.

After you log in, you connect your various social networks and it tells you how relevant your name is in a search. The system offers practical suggestions for building your reputation and advanced analytics to monitor your progress.

Viewing your not-so-private information online

Even if you don’t think you’re online, you still may be. So you need to be aware of what people can find out about you through an online search. Even if you don’t own a computer, people can use the readily available online tools in the following sections to find your personal information, including home address, phone number, and estimated annual income. Scary? Yes, it is.

Poking through your private data with Spokeo

Spokeo (www.spokeo.com) is one of the most popular search engines that human resources (HR) departments use. If you're applying to a larger company, chances are the hiring manager will put your name into this tool for any last-minute background checks.

Spokeo pulls your name and other contact information from a huge database of public records to put together a demographic profile of you. And, yes, as unnerving as it sounds, results include your estimated income, political party, marriage status (and spouse’s name), number of kids, and other personal data based on your zip code.

The results in Spokeo (or any other people search) are only as good as the sources of data the program pulls from. Spokeo draws assumptions about you based on its algorithm, so the assumptions may not be 100 percent accurate. Hiring managers know the results can be flaky, so they take them with a grain of salt. They’re simply looking for any red flags that they can double-check on later.

To discover whether your name is associated with any red flags, run it through a Spokeo search and see what comes up. You’ll likely see other people with your name. Find yourself in the results and see how accurate your profile is. In some cases, you may discover that your name doesn’t appear at all. Although this scenario may please your inner privacy fan, it may not please the hiring manager trying to find out more about you. If you’re in this situation, you may need to work twice as hard as the next guy to build your reputation simply because you don’t have an online presence.

Even if you can’t change Spokeo’s results, at least you can know what other people are seeing about you, which gives you the opportunity to bring it up directly during your application process. You can keep it light, too, such as, “Well if you think I earn $250,000 a year, have five kids, and live in a mansion based on some online searches for my name, then this salary negotiation may be the best I’ve ever had!”

You can see only basic information from Spokeo for free. If you want a full report, you have to cough up a yearly fee. See the website for more details.

Zeroing in on your personal records with ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com) doesn't just aggregate information about you into a single personal record (unlike Spokeo, which I cover in the preceding section). Instead, it allows you to manually claim your profiles. In other words, some artifacts that show up in search results may be about you and others not, so you can claim the ones you want in order to create a more rounded profile of yourself. ZoomInfo pulls from current information, such as blog posts or news items, as well as static public records.

What’s nice about ZoomInfo is that you can create an account and begin claiming profiles. Do this before someone else claims them for you. If any bit of information is inaccurate or irrelevant to your current job search, remove it. You have full control over what’s included in your ZoomInfo profile. And ZoomInfo gives preference to profiles that are claimed by members.

Records that you manually claim and verify with ZoomInfo rank higher than unclaimed records, which means you have a good chance of showing an HR recruiter the real you online.

Other online assessment tools to check out

If you’re like me and want a complete picture of your online profile, you can continue your assessment using these tools as well.

Net Clarify (www.netclarify.com): The free report runs search results, both social and traditional through a fancy algorithm in order to gauge sentiment. With employment in mind, they flag potential entries that may hurt your chances of getting a job or even an interview.

kgbpeople (www.kgbpeople.com): After entering your full name, the tool runs more than 20 simultaneous searches, from social to traditional, from personal records to videos and images. I find their image and video search results to be very complete.

Spezify (www.spezify.com): This visual search engine only shows visual search results. If you're concerned about images from your past, this is a good tool to see where they may still be lurking.

Taking advantage of social media search engines

Google isn’t perfect when it comes to searching the social web because it doesn’t deliver many results from real-time content such as Tweets, less-popular blogs, and frequently updated news sites. The danger is that these more obscure sites can still damage your reputation despite their lower Google rank.

That’s where social media search engines come in. These search engines specifically search out the different social media sites and tell you (or a prospective employer) who’s saying what about you.

Social media search engines look at more recent content, unlike Google, which still takes some time (up to a week) to index and deliver results. A bad reputation is a tricky situation. So if you have a few extra minutes to use these sites and be doubly sure that your reputation is up to snuff, I suggest you do so. If your reputation isn’t what you’d like it to be, I show you how to spiff it up in the later section “Improving Your Reputation and Increasing Your Visibility.”

Finding the social you on Social Mention

Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) searches the real-time web, which is online content posted recently, and the social web, which includes blogs, Tweets, news sites, review sites, and bookmarking sites.

Simply enter your name in quotation marks in the search field and choose All for the search. Within seconds, Social Mention delivers a thorough analysis. When I run this search for myself, I’m frequently shocked by how many times my name is mentioned, even just casually, on someone’s blog.

As it’s performing the search, the Social Mention program judges the search query by four metrics: strength, sentiment, passion, and reach. These dimensions are what Social Mention thinks are important for an online reputation. They’re clearly explained on the site when you hover your mouse cursor over your scores. You also can see how frequently a mention of your name occurs. You can even see which keywords are associated with your name and on which types of media a mention occurred. I like to click on the YouTube link to see what embarrassing videos my personal trainer has posted.

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Finally, the Sources section clues you into which social network is talking about you the most. This information is great to have when you plan your campaign. If one network (or medium) dominates, then that’s a great place to start building content.

Checking other social search sites for your name

Just for the sake of being thorough, here are a few other search engines you can use to see whether anyone’s talking about you:

Pipl (www.pipl.com): HR professionals commonly use this people search engine. What I like about Pipl is that its search results page is thorough and includes public records, social media mentions, and multimedia mentions (such as pictures, for example).

Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com): This engine is a simple way to search Twitter's real-time feeds to see whether your name has been mentioned. If you have a Twitter username, try also searching for that.

WhosTalkin (www.whostalkin.com): This social media search engine looks through blog sites, news sites, and other social media.

Using a Paid Reputation Service

New companies have popped up that are specifically focused on helping you repair and maintain a positive online reputation. Of course, their services cost money. Later in this chapter I explain how to do the same things yourself, but if you’re the type who’d rather throw some money at the problem, here are some options.

BrandYourself (http://brandyourself.com): Although this is the most hands-on option, it's also the most affordable. This service guides you through a link-building process around all your major social media properties. When linked together in just the right way, the average BrandYourself user boosts her profile ranking by two pages.

Virallock (www.virallock.com): This company was founded by a venture capitalist who was worried about his teenage daughter's online safety. He gathered a team of experts to build a system to identify problems and then solve them. When you pay for this service, an actual human being (a trained expert) goes into your accounts and cleans them up for you. The company also issues take-down notices to websites with bad or inaccurate information about you.

Safe Shepherd (www.safeshepherd.com): This service offers a pay-for-action model. After running a diagnostic on your online reputation, it shows you areas that need remediation or correction. You then pay if you want the company to take down that information or change it.

Reputation.com (www.reputation.com): This company offers the most robust set of services, mostly done through its custom-built technology. After you log in, you come to a dashboard where you can take certain actions, like issue take-down notices or schedule alerts.

Improving Your Reputation and Increasing Your Visibility

If you don’t like the results that come up when you search for yourself online, you have a bad online reputation. You also have a problem if no results about you show up, good or bad. Many people with a poor online reputation feel helpless and angry and just don’t know what to do about it, but fixing this situation is far from impossible.

The answer to the problem is to simply bury the old, bad content beneath a barrage of new, good content. Or if you have no results, start building fresh content. Eventually the older search results will fall into Internet obscurity. So get ready to face your bad or nonexistent rep head on and begin using some of the options I outline in this section to rebuild your online reputation. (Note: The worse your reputation is, the more work you have to put into rebuilding it.)

Understanding how online reputations are built with SEO

I would be remiss if I didn’t start my discussion about online visibility with the term search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO, the art and science of ranking websites on Google and other search engines, is accomplished by making subtle changes to a website’s content, coding, and structure and by growing incoming links to the page. A good SEO campaign is rooted in thorough keyword research so you know which words are most important to include in your content. (I tell you all about keyword research in Chapter 5.)

In SEO-speak, two factors affect whether Google (or another search engine) delivers a particular site on the first page (the most desirable page):

On-site factors: On-site factors, such as the content you include on online résumés and personal websites, are directly within your control. (Flip to Chapter 11 for details on these.)

Off-site factors: An off-site factor is beyond your control, such as links pointing to your site, your content reprinted on other sites, or other people’s mention of your name. However, you can post content to high-ranking Google sites in order to leverage their high rank and ensure your name gets seen by Google.

The sections that follow arm you with the tools and strategies you need to make yourself more visible online and in the way you want to be seen — whether you’re building a reputation from scratch or rectifying negative or misleading content.

Ranking yourself in Google

The easiest way to rank yourself in Google is to generate your own content. Building your own website or writing your own blog provides content that gets you ranked — but only if you use your name in the appropriate places. I give you tips on repurposing your portfolio for online content later in this chapter (and for guidance on constructing an effective personal website, see Chapter 11).

If you don’t want to build your own website or write your own blog but still want to rank in Google, here are some other tricks you can consider:

Customize your LinkedIn domain name. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), a professional networking site, is considered a high-authority website by Google. (A high-authority website simply means that Google thinks its content is more valuable than other sites.) If you change your LinkedIn public URL (domain name) to your full name, your name will start to rank in Google. Your domain name should look like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. To achieve this, simply go to your profile, click on Edit next to the Public Profile section, and customize the domain. Often, as you build your online reputation, this minor change will be the first win you notice in Google's results. Look for more details in Chapter 9.

Customize your LinkedIn links. With LinkedIn, you’re allowed to link to three external websites. Most people use the default settings, like Personal Website or Company Website, but it pays to get a little more unique and specific. In Chapter 9, I explain how to customize the name of a link so that it says something like Joshua’s Résumé or Joshua’s Slideshows rather than the generic Company Website.

Make as much of your LinkedIn profile public as possible. When you edit your public profile in LinkedIn, make sure you’re including as much information as possible. Doing so ensures that Google will index more relevant information about you.

Buy your own domain name. The fastest way to get your name ranking in Google is to have a domain name that matches the search query. For example, if a hiring manager is going to search for "John T. Jones" in Google to find out more about you, then purchase www.johntjones.com to be sure that page ranks. If you want to quickly dominate Google's first page, I suggest you read Chapter 11, where I walk you through the process of buying a domain of your own name. Then you can point that domain name to anything you want, such as an online résumé, your public LinkedIn profile, or an About.me page.

Everything you publish online is public record and will be there forever. So be sure that your links, articles, and anything else you publish falls within your personal brand, is professional, and is how you want to be represented online.

Skipping around the web: Making linking work for you

Linking (also called hyperlinking) is a way to reach another web page from the one you’re currently viewing. You simply click the link and you’re there. People who work with SEO for a living know that when Google sees a link on a referring web page, the destination web page is supposed to be related to the link itself. Even if you aren’t an SEO master, you can use this technique, called contextual linking, to bolster your online presence. You should always link to other sites this way; it’s considered best practice.

When you see the following two links, which one tells you exactly where you’re going to end up when you click it? (The links are underlined for the illustration.)

Example 1: Click to see Joshua Waldman’s Résumé.

Example 2: Click HERE to see Joshua Waldman’s Résumé.

When Google comes across the first example, it expects to find my résumé at the other end. The search engine reads the domain name and the content on the page and expects to see the words Joshua Waldman’s Résumé. If it doesn’t see those words, that link doesn’t pass any magical Google juice (which is why the word HERE as a link doesn’t work well). If it does, the destination page — in this case, my résumé — gets a higher Google rank.

The more you link all your online content together, the more Google juice you’re passing around to yourself. So any time you link to anything else, use contextual linking. I don’t want to see you using the horrible click here technique!

Being unique if your name is John Smith (or something else common)

Not everyone is as lucky as Ashton Kutcher when it comes to having a unique name (and good looks, as my wife likes to point out). People with unique names can much more easily rank in Google and build an online reputation. However, if you have a common name, like John Smith or Sarah Jones, don’t fret. You can still differentiate yourself online. Just do the following:

Use your middle initial. Your middle initial may separate you from all the other Johns and Sarahs. But keep in mind that, after you begin using your middle initial, you must use it everywhere to make this tactic work, including in your LinkedIn profile, website address, account profiles, business cards, and so on. In essence, you’re rebranding yourself.

Use your degree or professional license or certificate. Sometimes your middle initial won’t work, so including your professional credentials, such as CPA, Leed Certificate, LPN, or NCC, is another way to differentiate yourself. For example, someone else with your exact name may use the same initial for her brand as well. Not to worry. You can always further narrow down the search by branding yourself with your degree or specialty. Those three-letter abbreviations after your name really do come in handy sometimes.

Create your own search button. Going forward, you may as well assume that prospective employers will Google you. So rather than wait for some random hiring manager to type your name into Google and struggle to find anything relevant about you, why not give him a search button you’ve designed to return the most accurate results? You’ll save him the time and hassle of trying to find you. After you create a customized search button, you can include it with your job application and e-mail signature.

You can use Vizibility (http://vizibility.com) to create a SearchMe button. This button helps you design your own Google search results page. You tell the tool what you want the search results to include, and then it creates a search query that produces those results. When someone clicks on the SearchMe link, it sends that custom search query to Google and delivers the results you designed. In other words, the SearchMe button is a specialized Google search query with predictable results that helps your searcher save time.

Repurposing your portfolio

Whether you’re building, repairing, or burying your online reputation, at some point you’ll need to generate new content. Creating a large quantity of new online content can feel a bit overwhelming. Who wants to write a new article or create a new video every week? Not me. Instead, I suggest that you first consider repurposing your old work content.

After all, don’t you have old reports, presentations, or videos that show you in a good light? Have you ever put together a financial analysis or presented a group project? You may have to go back to your school days, but that’s okay. Simply go back into your old boxes and records and look for the following types of content:

Articles, essays, projects, or reports you’ve written or presented

Business cases you’ve written

Design projects you’ve worked on

Marketing initiatives you’re proud of

Newspaper clippings

PowerPoint slides you’ve presented

Photos of you in action or in a professional setting

Video clips or films that you’ve created or that show you in action

After you collect these artifacts, think about which ones best represent you and the quality of your work. Put yourself in the shoes of a curious hiring manager. He wants to learn more about you. Is any of this content self-explanatory and complimentary?

After you gather and choose your content, you have to find a place to post it so that search engines will index it and, ideally, display it when your name is researched. Many of the free content-sharing websites out there not only are indexed by Google but also let you upload various types of media. In the following sections, I fill you in on the best ways to post your different types of old content.

Publishing your written materials

For Google, content is still king. If you have written materials from past jobs or from your time at school, you’re sitting on a gold mine of content that can help you rank. The best thing you can do with these materials is publish them on high-ranking content-sharing sites or blogs. However, before you can publish your golden nuggets, you may have to tweak them so they’re most effective.

If your content contains sensitive material from a company or anything that may harm an organization, you need to clean it out. Either remove any specific mention by changing the names of things (products or companies, for example) to fictitious names or find a way of altering the text so you can remove the sensitive parts completely without ruining the flow of the prose.

You also want to make sure your writing has the proper keywords and links. The most important keyword is your name. Make sure your full name appears at the top and bottom of the document with links to your other online properties.

Use this format for the top of the document:

Keyword-Rich Title

By Your Full Name (linked to an online résumé)

At the bottom of your document, include an author’s resource box. In this area, be sure to include the following information:

Your full name

A brief description of what you do, including your value statement, if you have one (see Chapter 5 for more on value statements)

Any relevant links, including your LinkedIn profile (remember to use contextual linking, not just “click here”)

A call to action, such as “call me” or “e-mail me”

Here’s an author’s resource box I sometimes use (the underlined bits of text are links):

Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, is recognized as one of the nations top authorities in social media career advancement. To learn Joshua's secret strategies for shortening the online job search and getting the right job right away, watch his exclusive video training here to learn How To Use Social Media Find a Job: http://careerenlightenment.com/training.

After you’ve dolled up your written material, you’re ready to post it to high-ranking sites online. Open accounts with each of these free services:

Docstoc (www.docstoc.com): This site promotes document sharing. The more you upload to Docstoc, the more documents you can download. In your case, each document you submit will be indexed by Google.

WordPress (www.wordpress.com): You can use WordPress to create a blog site for yourself where you can distribute your old papers, reports, or articles. These sites usually rank pretty high in Google.

Scribd (www.scribd.com): This popular document-sharing network is also indexed by Google. You can invite friends to join your network, and then you can see when they post as well. You also get a public profile that you can customize.

Keep your written submissions to about 500 words. Generally speaking, people don’t read content longer than that online. If your material is longer than 500 words, break it up into parts.

Publishing your video materials

If you have any video footage of yourself in a professional capacity, consider posting it online. Why? Because YouTube, a video-sharing website, is the second-largest search engine in the world. Vimeo (https://vimeo.com), another video-sharing site, seems to rank even higher than YouTube, according to BrandYourself.com

When I was building up my online reputation, I found a lot of archived footage of me doing public speaking. Most of it was raw footage, long and unedited. So I pieced together short segments from each video and created a short commercial for myself (check it out at http://careerenlightenment.com/speaking). If you have only raw footage, I suggest you produce a similar video.

When publishing an online video, try to edit your raw footage down to three- to five-minute chunks. For tips on video editing, see Chapter 10.

After you've collected and edited your old video footage, make sure you post it to as many video-sharing sites as you can. OneLoad, which allows you to post one video to 20 different sites all at once (including YouTube and Vimeo), makes publishing easy. Visit www.oneload.com for more details. I also explain how to use the platform in Chapter 10.

Google doesn’t search content in the video itself. The power of posting online video is in the description, category, and tags that you assign to the video when you post it online. To help boost your online reputation, be sure to use your full name in the description and in the tags.

YouTube now allows you to post a transcript of a video for closed captioning. When you do this, Google can index the video more thoroughly and increase your chances of ranking.

Publishing your slides and presentations

If you went to business school or gave presentations for past jobs, you probably have plenty of PowerPoint slides hanging around. You can repurpose these slides by posting them on SlideShare (www.slideshare.net), a slideshow-sharing social network that can get you ranked in Google. Not only does SlideShare have hundreds of thousands of fascinating presentations to go through and learn from, but it also lets you share your slideshow directly on your LinkedIn profile.

What makes SlideShare such a powerful Google ranking tool is that it actually reads and indexes the content of the slide and activates the links in the body of the slide. So if you use your name in the slide and include links to your LinkedIn profile and other online properties, that slideshow has a good chance of showing up when someone searches for your name. Here are the steps to take when repurposing slides:

1. Polish your slideshow.

Because you won’t be around every time someone views your slideshow, it needs to stand on its own and be self-explanatory. Imagine someone going through your slideshow without you narrating it. Make sure that person can understand the content and get the point of each slide. If you have any doubt, make changes to the slideshow so that each slide has this level of clarity.

I suggest looking at some of the more popular presentations on SlideShare and taking careful notes on how the authors make each slide communicate the point. Notice how the better slideshows get a single point across for each slide and aren’t overly bulleted.

2. Give your slideshow links.

Include live hyperlinks inside the slideshow itself. Be sure to link to your LinkedIn profile, online résumé, or other web properties. However, don’t overdo it; one on each slide is enough.

3. Include keywords, such as your name and field of interest.

You’re trying to get your own name to rank in Google, so be sure it appears at least two times in your slideshow. You may also want to use some of the keywords you researched when forming your personal brand in Chapter 5.

Use your name as footer text in your slides so it appears on every page without being obnoxious. For the most impact, create a footer for each slide that looks like this (with your full name linking to your blog or LinkedIn profile): “Copyright 2014 Your Name. If you publish or borrow any of these ideas, kindly reference this link: www.YourBlogOrResume.net.”

4. Submit your slideshow to SlideShare.

After you upload your slideshow, SlideShare converts it to an online format.

5. Add the SlideShare application to your LinkedIn profile.

Log into your LinkedIn profile and add the link to your profile (I discuss how to do this in Chapter 9). Doing so is a great way of showing a future employer what value you can provide to his organization by demonstrating your professional work.

Publishing your photos

Google’s search results page has become more and more multimedia oriented over the years. A results page used to be a simple list of links to websites, but now you can choose from images, videos, maps, and social networks. So when you post photos of yourself, you’re increasing your likelihood of ranking in Google. In order for Google to correctly index and serve an image, the image needs to have a proper description. Creating a description for an image depends on the image-sharing tool you use. Here are two great photo-sharing sites you can post images of yourself to:

Flickr (www.flickr.com): Flickr is a photo-sharing site frequently indexed by Google. The site allows you to create a free account and then upload images. When you upload images of yourself, use your full name in the title of the image and in the description area.

Google+ Photos (http://plus.google.com/photos): Google+ offers a photo sharing service that was built for headshots. When you upload a photo, the program allows you to name the face. You simply click the individual photo and name your face. Doing so adds a meta tag to the image. Google uses this tag to identify and index it. It's also smart enough to recognize that your name is associated with your face and semantically tag other photos it indexes. (See Chapter 14 for more on Google+.)

Publishing your creative projects

If you work in a creative industry like design or publishing, you probably have a stack of projects you've worked on or contributed to. Take a look through your stack and pick the best samples. Then upload them to Behance (www.behance.com), Carbonmade (www.carbonmade.com), or FigDig (www.figdig.com). These portfolio-building sites are for creative professionals (for more on each of these sites, see Chapter 14). Google regularly indexes projects from these sites, so you have a good chance of ranking on the first page of results.

When setting up a portfolio, be sure to title it with your full name. Use your full name for the custom web address as well. By doing so, you create yet another domain with your name in it. You don’t need very many samples to make your point; aim for five to ten. You’ll have choices of layout and privacy settings. As long as your project is made public or visible, Google will index it.

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Before posting any creative project you’ve worked on, verify that you have the rights to reproduce each item. If you don’t, ask the company for permission. It’s better to be denied permission and not get sued than to ask for forgiveness with a copyright violation fee!

Adding your content over time

Google is a pretty sophisticated robot. If you suddenly dump all kinds of new content with your name online, Google is likely to call foul. To avoid problems, make the process of building your online reputation methodical and consistent over many months. Don’t expect to see results right away. You’re running a marathon, not a sprint.

Base the frequency and length of your reputation-building campaign entirely on the results of your initial assessment (see the earlier section “Reviewing Your Online Reputation”). Ideally, you’ll post content about once a week. But if you fall into the category of having a bad online reputation, you may even consider posting content twice a week for six months.

To help keep track of when and what you want to post, prepare an editorial calendar (just like you would if you were running a newspaper or a blog). In a spreadsheet, map out 26 weeks for the first half of the year. Then write down which piece of content you’re going to post for each week. This type of preplanning helps you pace yourself, lower your stress level, and avoid getting on Google’s bad side by dumping tons of content online all at once. (For help determining the pool of content you have to pull from, refer to the earlier “Repurposing your portfolio” section.) If you don’t have enough repurposed content to fill up each week, consider generating new material.

Monitoring Your Reputation

Just as building your online reputation is an ongoing process, so is maintaining that reputation over the course of your career. When you monitor what people are saying about you, you can find inaccuracies before they spread, which gives you a chance to address problems quickly. Monitoring also helps you discover when people are saying good things about you so you can thank them. Monitoring allows you to track your progress as you build your online reputation. When you see your content show up in search results, you begin to realize that you have more control over Google than you once thought possible. It’s really cool to see yourself coming up more and more on Google week after week.

The following sections help you start the monitoring process by explaining how to set up alerts and make time for maintaining your online reputation on a regular basis.

Setting up alerts

Although it’s a good idea to search for your name once a month, keeping this habit up over time is difficult. You’ll forget one month and then the habit will be lost. The best way to monitor what’s going on in search results is to set up a Google Alert for your name. A Google Alert is a reverse search. As soon as Google indexes a piece of content with your search term, you get an alert or notice from Google. These notices tell you when your search term (in this case, your name) is processed by a robot as soon as it happens.

To set up a Google Alert for your name, go to www.google.com/alerts and type in your full name in quotations. As you can see in Figure 7-1, all you need to do next is set Type to Everything and How often to once a day. Then have the alerts sent to your e-mail address. If your name wasn't indexed, you won't get an e-mail.

Figure 7-1: The Google Alerts setup page.

If you want to monitor your presence in social media, you'll be pleased to know that you can set up alerts through Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) just like you can with Google. After searching for your full name in quotations at the Social Mention site, choose the E-mail Alert link. With this feature, you get an e-mail every time someone blogs about you, tweets about you, or says anything about you on any social media site. Note: The results in your Social Mention alerts typically will be much different from those in your Google Alert (as I explain in the earlier section "Finding the social you on Social Mention").

Scheduling regular maintenance

Assessing and building your reputation may be activities you primarily focus on for your job search, but you also need to monitor and maintain your reputation throughout your entire career. Unless the Internet disappears (yeah, right), you need to manage your online reputation. Think of it as an ongoing chore, such as taking your car in for an oil change. Somewhere in the calendar you use to schedule your time, create the following ticklers:

Every month, review your Google Alerts and Social Mention alerts.

Every six months, search your name using Google, ZoomInfo, and Pipl.

Once a year, take stock of your online presence by using the tools and strategies I present in the earlier “Reviewing Your Online Reputation” section.