Personal branding, company branding: What some thought leaders have to say

[Ibrahim88888]

There seems to be a meme going around regarding the idea of personal brand building that leads to corporate brand building. It's of personal interest to me as that's what I'm attempting to specific database do at Bizzuka. Here's what some thought leaders have to say. Can personal branding take a back seat.

Mike's Points

Business and branding #3: Brand You - Des Walsh
Personal branding: Is it right for you? - About. com Marketing
My thoughts on Chris Brogan & personal branding - Global Neighbourhoods
My best advice about personal branding - Chris Brogan
A corporate view of personal branding with pros and cons - Personal Branding blog

Got some personal branding I could borrow

• PR Squared
  There are a number of questions being asked in these and other posts: Can you use personal branding as a marketing tactic to build the corporate brand? Can personal brand equity be transferred to the company? Or, is personal branding purely narcissistic? Further, what happens to the corporate brand when the person leaves? (i.e. Scoble/Microsoft, Charlene Li/Forrester)

Controversy erupted over the social network

Spoke, with allegations being made that the site was collecting and selling personal information. Following my post about the issue where I suggested that Spoke had a word-of-mouth problem, the question was raised about how companies can overcome negative brand perceptions. I went to LinkedIn and asked the following question: "When you do a search on the Web for your business name or brand and negative results show up, how do you go about changing perceptions and protecting your reputation?"

Quite a number of people

Responded and what follows is a digest of what several of the most knowledgeable had to say. (I purposely left off names and other personally identifiable information. You can see that info at LinkedIn, however.) Please feel free to submit your own.

Build my own blog to address

The issue for two reasons. 1. To eventually beat out the other listing in the serps, 2. So that anyone who ever asks me about it, I can send them to the explanation I already have written. This is actually a good thing in the Web 2.0 era. If you think about it, people keeping us businesses honest. But as far as unjustified comments, I would recommend the following steps:

Make sure that the comments are indeed unjustified

You don't want to claim something that you are not sure about, so it is essential to know whether these people are telling the truth.
Try to reach out to these people if possible to change their perceptions. See what their issues are all about and how you can resolve misunderstandings.
Try to get your satisfied customers to help you out by giving you their feedback.

Get involved in the community

But don't bash these people as that is not good. If your focus is on customer satisfaction, then you need to show it. Bashing does not help that cause. Create a blog and try to communicate.
Do not be defensive. That's what personally kills it for me. If you are defensive, you are not helping yourself or others.
The question is to know whether you have mainly negative answers, or just some. If it's just some, do not spent too much time on them, except if they appear on the very first result page. In that case only, try to find out what went wrong, comment on the blog/site where the bad news come from, join the conversation on both your behalf and your company's and try to correct the situation.
For the rest, building a reputation is a long road. Work on your client service first, and be sure to have a way to communicate directly with your customers online. The corporate blog is the ideal way for that.

There are lot of different ways

This could be happening. Without more details, here is a strategic overview. Get in touch with the creators of negative information. Create ethical, informational responses, and explore creative PR responses;
SEO (search engine optimization/optimize) for the SERPs (search engine results pages), forums, blogs and other relevant touch points;
Target influencers.

Open a dialogue with the producers

Consider at first using a third party. Find out what motivates them before attempting to address issues. Sometimes you can bring their voice “into the fold,” other times address their motivators without needing to address the issues as you see them to bring about a positive change.

Respond to individuals who have complaints

Give them expanded service, or seek to bring their voice into a feedback forum, and off of a criticism forum. Get a voice in the touch points (forums, blogs, twitter, etc.) that negative results appear in—this needs to be someone’s job. Comment with clarity, patience and humor wherever the negative information appears. Link to positive responses to boost the ranking of those responses in the SERPs. Investigate the publicity aspects of having mixed results about your brand in the SERPs. building on the old adage "all publicity is good publicity."

If appropriate to have a response of integrity

Have on your site a press release, blog, whitepaper or special section with your response. Explore other touch points to put your response onto (forums, blogs, twitter, etc. If you are making changes in response to the criticisms, promote those changes directly as well as creatively. A creative response can expand virally and overwhelm negatives as other sites take up the connections. Many options here. A few that come to mind:
If any of your sites rank well in the SERPs, you can use internal link structure shifts to boost the ranking of your responses both inside and outside that site.

This week Google announced

That they are reducing multiple results from single domains (specifically, TLDs), so having more than 2-3 pages rank from one domain, such as your main site, is no longer an option. If you have multiple sites or touch points, strategically increase the number of results appearing above the negative, where possible. Google's universal search strategy means that a blog or YouTube video with lesser ranking "juice" can show in the SERPs alongside a web site with higher "juice." This means a smaller amount of SEO is required to rank, in some cases.