Sales Folks - Clean up your act!

Written by Justyn

Monday, 16 February 2009 04:35

As a sales professional, it's highly likely that you spend a good deal of time on the web. If you're not, you should be. What you might not realize is the permanent footprint you leave behind. With the proliferation of the web and the explosive growth of social media, the amount of individual information available online might surprise you. Want proof? Go to www.pipl.com and search for yourself.

Whether someone is looking for this information, or just browsing and clicking links, people ARE seeing this information. My suggestion, and the purpose of this post is to scrub this information and make sure that your professional reputation is represented in the best possible way.

Not every prospect or potential employer is going to google you or lookup your Facebook profile, but it is becoming increasingly popular and it's the first thing I do when I'm researching a contact. It's worth the time and the effort to make sure you're putting your best virtual foot forward. Things that may seem trivial among your circle of friends may not be as harmless to professional contacts.

This is especially true when it comes to things like politics, religious beliefs or that picture of you doing a keg stand at your family picnic.

Here are some tips to help you tidy up your online persona;

Start with Google

To start, google your name. Use quotations around your name in your Google search so you will only get exact matches. Take note of anything in the first 2 pages of results that you wouldn't share with a first date. If you have a common name, results that actually refer to you may not even appear in the first few pages, which is fine.

Now, visit the links that you would like removed from the search results and look for ways to either hide or delete that information. It may be a simple step, or may involve deleting an account from whatever site it may reside on. It might also be necessary to contact the site owner. In some cases (such as public records) you cannot remove this information, but you may be able to push it off of the front page using some ideas I'll share a little further on.

Keep your professional and social lives separate

You need to decide what level of distinction you want between social networking and your business. If you're trading jabs with friends, ranting about the last movie you saw or posting private pictures on Myspace or Facebook, it's probably best to keep business contacts off your friends list.

If you decide that you want to use Facebook or similar sites for business networking, make sure you clean up your profile so that it is suitable for this purpose. You can also control what content is available to your "friends" in the most popular online communities.

Updates

My suggestion is to use your favorite social network for friends/family, and use a site such as LinkedIn for business contacts. I prefer to keep them completely separate. It may also be useful to delete any outdated profiles. While your daily social site might be up to date, you don't want to forget about an old profile from your college days that could come back to haunt you.

Another thing to keep in mind is the recent popularity of tagging people in photos. Your name can be associated to a photo that someone else posts, and you may not even be aware of it. Of course most of us aren't being caught in tabloid worthy photos, but you need to be cognizant of this.

Load up on the good stuff

Once you have sterilized your online presence, it's time to make it shine. Here are a few good ideas for increasing your online cred;

Make sure you have a complete LinkedIn profile. Ask colleagues and clients for testimonials. A good LinkedIn profile should be as complimentary as a well written resume (and can be used for such).
If it's available buy www.yourname.com. You don't have to put anything there, you can simply redirect it to your LinkedIn profile or something similar. The reason this is good to have is because search engines will often place sites with the search term in the domain name higher in the search results.
Have some useful information to share with the world? Have articles published on sites like www.ezinearticles.com. Sites with large amounts of traffic rank very high in search engine results.
Participate in online forums related to your industry, interests or job role. Not only can they be informative, they also do very well in search engine results.

As Bing Crosby said, you've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. Your online persona is going to become increasingly important in any profession and it will benefit you to keep these things in mind.

Reader Question: Do you have tips for online reputation? Please share them in the comments.

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