BASELINE ASSESSMENT

The quickest way to assess your brand online is to do a Web search for your name, and also go to YouTube, which is second only to Google as a search engine of choice. You’ll quickly learn whether you’re on the radar and, if you are, what is being said. You’ll see what articles are written, blog comments posted, and videos available. Most people only research the first two or three pages of Google and the first page or two of YouTube, so in five to ten minutes you’ll have a baseline.

You want to know this because this is what potential employees, customers, vendors, analysts, investors, and the media see when they go looking for you and your company, what you see is what they see. They’re checking out your personal profile, reading what is said about you, and watching your videos. Do you like what they are reading and seeing? If not, what can you do about that? If you don’t have a presence at all, that sends a message about whether you and your company are in the stream of the online world. As we move rapidly forward to a time when most information is online, staying out of the social world will be more difficult and more risky. Eventually a leader’s absence from social media will be seen as curious, perhaps aloof, not....