Reputation not just what you say about yourself, but more and more importantly, what others say about you. In the previous 2 posts I discussed building a search profile for yourself. Today, I’ll build on that a bit. If my first statement is true, which I think it is, then it’s not enough to just promote stories about yourself. You need and want people to find stories and comments that other people have written about you.

Today, social media has opened up a new era of transparency. People are cynical about marketers. You know those old testimonials that we used to put on all of our websites from “Bob Jones in Chicago”. Those ones with no link to Bob, his email or any information that Bob was a real guy and his testimonial was real. Those don’t have a lot of impact anymore. Thus it is important to promote verifiable comments, opinions, recommendations and views about you and/or your business by 3rd parties. These are more legitimate when they come from a 3rd party and they are published on a 3rd party site.

So when I promote all of my own profiles to increase their collective search rank, I also link to and mention stories, articles and comments about me on other sites so those rise higher in the search results for my name.

StepRep helps this process first by helping you find comments and stories about you. It helps you find them early and allows you to comment on things in a timely manner. You’ll often want to reply to comment and stories whether they are positive or negative. StepRep further helps promote these stories by putting all of the good ones on your StepRep profile. As you promote this profile, the links to your good stories become more and more valuable. An easy way to promote your StepRep profile is to place the StepRep widget on your other sites and profiles. It rolls through your good stories and it links back to your profile.

In the end, you want a good mix of results when someone Googles your name. You want some of your websites and personal profiles to show up and you want 3rd party comments and stories to show up.