In Ben Kinney’s book, Soci@l, he talks about building your brand and online image and how important it is.

He explains how important transparency is and that being true to your word is mandatory in today’s online world. 

This chapter also discusses being consistent in your brand and building a brand to which you can be true.  He suggests you do this by asking a series of questions and asking your clients and friends about their perceptions of you and your brand.  Further, he reminds us that we should not be at odds with our brand, suggesting that an agent who sells distressed properties might not want to show up in designer labels and luxury cars.

Perhaps the most important idea to me in this chapter is the discussion of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.  This is a reminder to me that I need to work on my brand and making it more memorable.  Every time I hear this reference, I know that I have more, important work ahead of me.

He also speaks of either combining or separating your business and personal profiles online.  He explains that neither your clients nor search engines will know the difference between your personal and professional profiles and that some online sites will delete you for having more than one. and determines that it is very difficult to split them though he gives guidelines for combining them properly.

Another important point of this chapter is that we need to monitor our online brand and one way to control this is to make sure that we spend enough time on our online brand to control the first 10 entries on the search engines, particularly Google.  Not monitoring your brand means that other are “monitoring” it for you.  Part of monitoring your brand is claiming your profile on important sites like FaceBook and Twitter so that others don’t claim them instead of you.

Looking for more tips on social networking?  Download a copy of the book from the link below.

This blog post is a review of Soci@l: Attract Friends, Followers and Connections to Your Business. Soci@l is a free download written by Ben Kinney in conjunction with ActiveRain and Jay Papasan. In exchange for downloading the free copy of Soci@l and writing this review, I have a chance to win a free iPad and I’m getting 2000 ActiveRain points.

Download a free copy of Social here and find out how you can have a chance to win an iPad and be guaranteed 2000 ActiveRain points.