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.

Here are a few tips to help protect your brand online:

Respect. Just like the post from yesterday, mutual respect can go a long way. If you wouldn’t want someone posting a suggestive image of you then don’t post one of them. If a friend asks you to remove an image or “wall-post” involving them, oblige.

Associations. Social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace allow you to showcase your support and involvement with various organizations and groups. Be careful in your selection and think about what a possible employer, coworker or family friend may think about your association with a particular group.

Linking. I have profiles on dozens of social media and networking sites, but I make a conscious effort to only link where appropriate. There is no need to link my Digg and Reddit accounts to LinkedIn, but it does make sense to link rural TECHNOCRAT to Twitter and LinkedIn.

Again, these are just some simple precautions you can use while building your personal online presence. Online media is accessible anywhere and by nearly anyone so use your head when publishing on the Web.

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.

Here are a few tips to help protect your brand online:

Respect. The global reach of the Internet allows you to communicate with customers, clients and individuals anywhere in the world. This also means that you will experience cross-border competition. Do not deface or sabotage competitors – aim for reciprocal respect. After all, you may need each other in the future.

Openness. Provide an avenue that gives the Internet community the opportunity to provide feedback regarding your offering. Embrace and address negative comments with the goal of making your product or service better. If you do not listen to your audience your brand will suffer.

Consistency. Be sure that the message your are presenting is focused and consistent. Guest writers and interviews can be beneficial for both parties, but you will only benefit if the content is consistent with your brand.

Value. Build a successful product or service by providing value, not by bashing competitors. Only by providing consumers with value can an organization flourish.

These are just a few ways that you can protect your brand from negative press that can quickly circulate online. Be sure to check back tomorrow for some tips on protecting your personal brand by taking some simple precautions online.

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.

Facebook has, in a relatively short period of time, become one of the largest social networking applications available online – connecting nearly 200 million individuals across the globe. How can you leverage this massive network to build an online presence for your brand? The key is Facebook Pages – a tool used by businesses, websites, and artists to create brand presence and awareness within the Facebook community. The page builder guides you through the steps of adding content and customizing the look of your Facebook page. At anytime you can easily update your page as well as add links, photos, and video that are related to your brand.

When it comes to managing and maintaining your Facebook page it is critical to keep it up-to-date – you need to maintain fan interest by providing them with relevant information on a regular basis. Combine this with a little self-promotion to friends, family, and colleagues and your network will start to grow. Maintain your fan interest and you will have successfully built an online presence within the Facebook community!

Twitter, to those that do not “tweet”, defines itself as “a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.” I was a relatively early adopter of Twitter and have seen the service through outage-ridden scalability issues all the way to the recent media obsession with the service. The key to using Twitter as a brand promotion tool is to provide your followers with regular updates related to your brand. This could be a new feature, a link to an article mentioning your product or service, giveaways, and anything else you can write in under 140 characters that may be of interest to your followers. For example, Digg, a social news website, uses Twitter to provide their followers with updates related to the company. Their Twitter profile, @Digg, (@ is the character preceding the Twitter username) has over twenty thousand followers who receive regular updates with regard to the company.

Similar to Facebook, the key to gaining followers is to build up an initial group of followers and allow social networking to take its course. Be sure to provide your followers with interesting and relevant updates so they continue to follow your “tweets”. Brand spamming and providing irrelevant information to your followers is a quick way to lose them so be sure to provide them with well thought-out content. Nothing helps more than the occasional giveaway to a random follower.

In practice, why not take these two concepts and combine them? If you have a Facebook page set up, promote your Twitter feed from Facebook using a link or dedicate post. From Twitter, use Bit.ly or TinyURL to share your Facebook page with your Twitter followers. Many of us have accounts with Facebook and Twitter so use this cross-promotion to your advantage and combine your networks.

In conclusion, there are hundreds of ways to use social media to build an online presence, these are just two that have been pioneering the way brand presence can be both created and maintained online. Provide your fans and followers with relevant information on a regular basis and your brand can reach tens of thousands of quality consumers that, according to Gary Vaynerchuck, act as your “crusader, [your] word of mouth sprayer” – something that cannot be easily achieved by using mass marketing alone.

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.

Now, let’s take this argument and apply it to online advertising. If I see the exact same ad I saw on television, but now online, I can share the link with as many friends as I wish very quickly using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, etc. Many of these individuals would have never watched the ad on their own, but because of my recommendation they most likely will. This time, rather than forgetting to share, the link has already been sent to dozens of people at the height of my excitement using a variety of social media. This still does not take into address the quality of my viewership, however, from my experience I find that I am drawn to ads for products that I already use and enjoy. Sure, the Bud Light ad I view online still adds no value to their company as I do not consume their products, but the Alexander Keith’s ad I see gets spread around to my network quickly as I want to share a product I know and love.

Television can hit millions of viewers in a single blow, but online brand promotion uses a network of individuals to spread itself to interested consumers that may very well be within the target market.

Feel free to watch Gary Vaynerchuck’s video below or hit up Jeremy’s post for his take.

Be sure to check back soon as I will discuss how easy it can be for any business to build an online presence at no-to-little cost.