How to Protect Your Reputation and Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is carried with you, regardless of the type of career you pursue. Having a great reputation can help you secure new clients, new jobs, and new opportunities. However, a reputation is more than just your expertise and professional qualifications.
You need to look at your personal life as well and ensure that nothing from your past or present comes forward to hurt your reputation or personal brand. Protecting your brand and reputation will only become more important as time goes on, and you become more successful. Becoming a larger target means that you have harder to fall, so protect both your reputation and your personal brand with this guide:
Immediately Find the Right Lawyer if Charged with a Crime
It doesn’t matter if it is a clear case of mistaken identity. It doesn’t matter if you have a rock-solid alibi. You need a lawyer, especially if the crime is a particularly emotional one, like a sex crime.
With these emotional crimes it can all too quickly stop being about innocent until proven guilty, and instead of a terrible case of he-said-she-said, so the best way to conduct yourself is to find a specialist like this Riverside Sex Crimes Defense Attorney to take on your case, and get it resolved as quickly as possible before your name can get dragged through the mud.
Vet Your Social Media Accounts
One of the first steps you should make right now is to first go on your active social profiles and make them private. If you want to have a public account, then go through every single post and vet the content. Delete or edit posts that could be misinterpreted today. You might have written a tweet years ago that was wholly sarcastic or satiric that could come forward in the present day and show you in a different light. Don’t run that risk and keep your public accounts clean. Otherwise, keep them private and remove all but your close friends and family from your follower’s list.
A good way to vet your social media accounts is simple: Assume you’ll have a nosy employer or client that will parse through your entire digital identity, and make sure it’s up to snuff.
Delete or Deactivate Old and Unused Accounts
This is just smart digital security management. If you don’t use an account, haven’t touched it in years, and haven’t thought about it, then that account could:
- Possess content that could damage your reputation.
- Be an easy backdoor way for hackers to steal your personal information
Go through and have all these accounts deleted. If you are lucky, it will be an easy process, if not you will need to send in a deletion request to the site owner.
How to protect your reputation: google yourself
Finally, search for your name on search engines. If you have a common name, then you may even want to try to use SEO tactics to help boost your identity (for example on LinkedIn, your personal website, and so on) so that you are at the top of the rankings. Google and other search engines will also help you understand generally what a client or potential employer will be able to see about you, so use it as a guideline to manage your reputation both online and offline.