Five Simple (not easy) Steps to Build your Online Reputation

If you are reading this, you are already on social media. I would also presume that you are interested to better your Online Reputation, or in the least learn more about it. You would be pleasantly surprised to know the virtuous cycle will help you in your quest. People know you and hence they seek you & as you put content or engage with those who seek you, others find you. I call this the fun, learn and connect cycle. The only thing that stands between you and getting started is your natural inhibition

Are you mentally ready?

There is never a bad time to start. In order for the fun learn and connect cycle to work, one needs to be believe in the following, before starting:

1. Your personal brand is important and you believe in it
2. Online Reputation Management will be a key differentiator in your personal brand
3. It will require you to make time investments every day of the week (at least 15 mins a day)
4. You are comfortable exposing your thoughts, preferences and views to strangers and be challenged on them
5. You are here for the long haul and plan to stay the course

If you are not clear on any of the above, my sincere request would be to stop reading this piece. It would simply make you unhappy or waste your time

The O-STAR (Objective - Situation, Task, Actions & Results) method to get started

I am a great believer in frameworks to get things done. They act as a checklist and hasten the learning cycle. You can follow any project management method that works for you. I have found the O-STAR method useful. First define your objectives, then analyse the situation (challenges and enablers). Identify the Tasks that are to be accomplished in order to meet the objectives. Break up the tasks into actions and monitor the results versus your objectives. I share below the case study that I learned from an Influencer on LinkedIn

Step 1: Set Clear Objectives:

1. Be an influencer in next 36 months
2. Virtually Own your name in social media (the prime two pages when your name is typed in Google)
3. Give a good professional account of yourself to whoever searches for you

These were the rough goals the person set and met. You can set your own, but be clear on them

Step 2: Situation Analysis

Do a basic audit of how you currently are doing in the online space. The best place to start is to get simple numbers against the questions below:

• Presence (How many publications do you have online? e.g Blogs, Articles, White papers,). Where do you appear when you type your name in google?
• Mentions (Newspaper, online sites, citations)
• Connections (Followers, friends, colleagues)
• Sentiment / Reputation (Negative associations, Positive associations, nature of mentions)
• Links (What kind of other sites have aggregated your profile)
• Engagement (How many views, comments, shares and replies do you receive Vs similar profiles)

This step is intended to increase your overall consciousness, awareness and get a sense of the task at hand viz a viz your goals. If you find that the gap is large, then either revisit your goal or intensify your efforts

Step 3: Task identification

Based on the situation identified in Step 2, decide whether you are still up to the task alone or you want to jump start your journey by seeking external help. It will help at this stage to decide if you need any budgets. For e.g a Linkedin Premium Account may help you to reach out to potential business contacts or apply for a job. Do revisit your objectives realistically based on where the audit shows you. I am sure you will come up with a laundry list of things to do, but remember that 20% of Tasks lead to 80% of results. Brainstorm with a friend to prioritize

Step 4: Actions

Most of us can't think ourselves into a new way of acting, we need to act ourselves into a new way of thinking. Each of the tasks identified in step 3 above by you, needs to be converted into concrete actions. For e.g if the task is to seek external help, then the rough actions are:

• Search for Online agencies, take recommendations from friends
• Write out the brief for the agency and negotiate within budget. Get started

Forgive me for sounding a bit like the 5th grade teacher, but the above is as much to inspire myself. If only, we did all the things we believed in and agreed to do!. Use a bit of gamification – get a partner to go ahead in the journey with you. It saves costs, multiplies resources and ideas, whilst holding you accountable

Step 5: Results

Finally, what gets measured gets done. It takes years to build an Online Reputation. There is no one formula and your journey will not be linear (unless lucky and you may want to click the link here for inspiration). The objectives set out in Step 1 needs to have clear measurable deliverables that you will check yourself against(and your friend for his), and course correct every 3 months. Yes, 3 months is the rough cycle time for you to know whether something is working or not

Conclusion:

You may want to vet and remember the following:

- Its never too late to get started

- you are already better off than billions if you are reading this still! Not kidding

- help is at hand (there are zillions of free videos on the net to help you with specifics)

- increasingly social is the platform to build your individual & organization brand

- your organization benefits if you have a strong digital footprint and hence you may want to enlist their support

- the organization benefits more if many within it have a strong digital footprint. your colleagues ought to be your natural allies

How did you build your online reputation? Please do share your hacks and tricks. I really appreciate your reading my posts. If you find the post useful, please share it with people, groups or forums where you think it is relevant. You can follow me on @sarajitjha