WSJ on How to Establish Brand Image in Online Media

Brand Image… If you lead, teach, learn, work, manage, or not, you are a brand. How you build and manage that brand is up to you. In a recent article in the WSJ’s India Chief Mentor blog, Mahesh Murthy highlights the fact that

…online media are the most important place for your brand image to be established, defended and grown. This is where your offering comes face-to-face with your audience and where its responses can be measured, shaped and—if need be—countered in real time. This is where perceptions can be built, person by person. This brand building is more effective than the mode we’ve employed until now: TV commercials with 30 seconds of well-produced fiction that try to sell a brand image. It is more credible and much less expensive.

In the newest decade of the new millennium, online is the place where more and more people are spending their time. It is the place where brand and reputations will be built and grown. Mahesh recommends the same tactics I do. Google yourself. Did you find what you expected? Mahesh continues:

Among the results will be your Web site, news items about you, other Web users who mention you, blogs about you, tweets about you, videos starring you and such. Now work to own the presence in each of these elements.

Refine your website, respond to tweets, strengthen your Facebook fan page, add videos to YouTube. Make the top ten Google search results reflect exactly what you want. Own your online brand.