Do you know how important it is to secure your own name online? This is known as “self-PR” and is a vital element of reputation management. In fact, when you work with an online reputation management company, one of the first things they will look into is who owns your name – on social media, on blogs, and on the internet as a whole. Something that few people understand, however, is that this is important not just in terms of your personal good name, but even in terms of how you raise your children!
Post Modern Parenting Is Virtual
A parent’s job is to make sure their children are prepared to live in the real world. Today, this means ensuring your child has lots of fun, active, and educational things to do. It means encouraging them to go to college and making the most out of themselves. But today’s parenting is also about being virtual, and it can be difficult for parents to understand how the two combine. A perfect example, for instance, is that colleges and universities often want prospective students to submit an essay. This continues today, but the admissions teams now also look up an applicant’s LinkedIn profile to understand their professional style.
Prospective employers do the same. References are seen as subjective. However, criminal history, credit history, Facebook, and LinkedIn, which are behavioral reference sources, are much more trusted. This is why it is so important that, from an early age, young people build a positive presence online, and a strong online reputation, which is what parents should help with.
Personal Websites
Setting up a LinkedIn account is important, but so is the creation of a personal website. These are:
- Easy to customize to the aspirations and personality of the individual.
- Affordable.
- Beautiful.
- A great way to highlight the positive about a person.
Having a personal website is about branding yourself, and parents should be strongly involved in organizing this for their children. In fact, more and more parents now speak to reputation management companies to find out about best practice strategies to do this. They are being proactive, as they see their children approach an age at which they want to become active online.
The Name Craze
So what does all of this has to do with names? If a prospective employer, college, university, or friend, wants to look a person up, they do this by typing that person’s name into the search engines. The top result that will then come up, generally speaking, is any result that includes that name in the URL. You can easily own the entire first page of Google simply by setting up a personal website, a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, an Instagram account, and a Snapchat account. Even if you don’t enter much information on these pages just yet, it means that a prospective search sees the seven top results that you can control, and that you can populate with positive information.