Yesterday I introduced a few easy methods that can be applied to protect your professional online brand. Today I will discuss some simple actions you can take to protect who you are and what you, as a person, represent online – in other words, your personal brand. After all, this is probably the most important brand that requires the most protection.

Your Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr profiles all work together and make what I would call your online brand. It is this online brand that others use to judge your character in both the virtual and real world, particularly employers. Many companies will access your Facebook, MySpace and Twitter profiles to evaluate how you may fit into their organization. Many of today’s youth do not understand the permanency of what is posted online – something that may come back to haunt them in the future.

Today, while trying to correct my wicked slice, I started thinking about the online brandosphere and how modern brands require protection online. The term “brand” can represent so many entities, particularly in the online arena – it could be the biggest commercial name on the planet or your personal online identity. Brand managers and individuals use the same online tools to promote their products and themselves to a global audience. As the online presence of any entity grows it becomes increasingly important that you take the proper precautions to protect your brand from failure.

This post will take a look at protecting a professional brand by applying some Web knowledge and common sense. In this case I am considering a professional brand to be anything representing a product or a service including focused blogs like rural TECHNOCRAT. Promoting your brand online can be an essential part of doing business and, as I discussed in an earlier post, it be can be done with very little investment. Unfortunately, due to mismanagement or just bad luck any success can just as easily be lost, resulting in a brand that is difficult to resurrect.

My last post largely focused on the quality difference between television and online viewers of advertisements. This article is switching gears slightly by discussing how any company, regardless of size, can build an online presence with no investment other than a little time here and there.

Suppose you are a product manager or business owner and you are looking to promote your product or service but have little-to-no budget for brand promotion – what can you do? Ruling out conventional advertising is easy – that is, no television, radio or print promotion. You consider online advertising, but even that can be costly. This is where the juggernaut that is social media becomes your gateway to building an online presence for your brand.

There are many social media tools you can use to promote your brand, I will focus on two of the most popular, Facebook and Twitter. These tools can be used interchangeably or on their own by anyone – from brand managers at giant corporations to small business owners. The technical skills required are minimal, the only necessities include consistency, relevancy, and frequency of updates.

A few days ago I was wandering through Internet marketing blogs looking for some applicable knowledge I could take take away. To be honest, there are a lot of very dull articles out there. Fortunately, Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV is a very entertaining presenter who shares his thoughts and insights on many subjects with the world using video. I have been a long time fan of Gary’s near-daily video podcasts reviewing wine, but I was largely unaware of his work in the field of Internet marketing.

This is where one of my new favourite online resources comes into play, the blog of R3R Web Business Consultants. A recent post by Jeremy Reither showcases one of Gary’s latest videos with regards to television vs. Internet marketing from a social perspective. Rather than rehash Jeremy’s post, I encourage you read his analysis of of Gary’s view on the power of social media.

As Jeremy eludes, the arguments Gary presents are both sensible and logical. The biggest Superbowl ads may reach hundreds of millions of viewers, but what is the quality of these viewers to the business. For example, I enjoy many beer ads I see on television, but I almost never buy a specific brand of beer just because of their ads – this shows that my viewing is of little value to them. If the ad itself is entertaining I may discuss it with friends and family, but this grand experience I may have had in viewing will soon be lost. I may think “Hey!! Jody will love this ad, I will have to tell him about it!”, unfortunately, in most cases I will forget to share as my excitement quickly subsides.