Jimmy Gilmore

This train wreck that’s been hap­pen­ing on all the gos­sip sites, new chan­nels, and sports out­lets should be dri­ving two things home to every­one who lives in the dig­i­tal age. There is no pri­vacy and can’t con­trol your per­sonal brand.

So what if you’re not Tiger Woods with mil­lions of dol­lars of endorse­ments to worry about? You have a poten­tial employer, neigh­bor, girl­friend, or rel­a­tive that will Google you and what comes up should be good. Also there sev­eral search engines cre­ated just to pull up all the good and bad about you.

So what’s a per­son liv­ing in the dig­i­tal age to do? For­tu­nately, you can use some of the same strate­gies we advise com­pa­nies to use every day that will help you give your per­sonal brand the guid­ing influ­ence it needs.

Mon­i­tor every­thing. It’s easy to set up a Google Alert on your name right now.

Cre­ate your own con­tent instead of leav­ing it all up to oth­ers. That means:

• Start a pro­fes­sional blog. It isn’t as hard a you might think.
• Cre­ate account pro­files even if you don’t use them often on Yahoo and Google and any­where else you can think of that will reflect well on you.
• Tweet. It’s even eas­ier than blogging.
• Cre­ate a pro­file on Linkedin. Everybody’s doing it and they search pretty well.
• Get active on social net­works and tweak your pri­vacy set­tings so what you want peo­ple to see is vis­i­ble and what you don’t isn’t. I have mine set on Face­book so that any­one can find me but only friends can see per­sonal infor­ma­tion and updates, and so that search engines will not index my infor­ma­tion. Most impor­tantly, I set my photo set­tings so only I can see pho­tos tagged of me (hey, I went to col­lege before the dig­i­tal cam­era rev­o­lu­tion.) For all other net­works, I limit my con­ver­sa­tion to what would be appro­pri­ate dis­cus­sion with clients and col­leagues. For me, that’s prob­a­bly broader than others.

Don’t dis­cuss pol­i­tics or reli­gion online unless it’s your pro­fes­sion – mean­ing a polit­i­cal colum­nist or a min­is­ter. Why give some­one a rea­son not to like you before they get to know you?

Attempt to cor­rect any mis­in­for­ma­tion out there or at least ask to add your side of the story.

Stay up to date. If you got mar­ried, it be a good idea to remove that pro­file on a dat­ing site, lest you look­ing like a cheater.

Oh, and don’t for­get to be good. It’s hard to keep a secret these days, so you might as well not take any chances.