Managing Your Personal Brand Online

With the proliferation of news sites, social networking profiles and video and photo sharing, you (your name or your photo) can probably be found all around the Internet. Increasingly, people are trying to manage their online brands. But before you "manage" your mentions, you need to know what mentions are out there. There are a couple of easy, interesting ways to do this:

Google:
If you are like most of us, occasionally you type your name into google to see what you will get. To get automatic updates you can set up google news alerts with your name as the key words and you will get an email any time a news story or blog mentions you.

Addict-o-matic:
This is a site that searches major websites and services for mentions key words. It searches Twitter, Google Blog search, Yahoo News, Flickr among others. It is a great way to search a large number of important sites and services.

Technorati:
Technorati is a well know blog search engine service. They seek to make the blogosphere accessible. You can search for blogs by topic. You can see which blogs have the most traffic. You can also search your name if you so choose to see if you are coming up in any blog discussions. Unlikely for most of us, but you half-famous people may need this.