Personal reputation management

Reputation management is vital to everyone. Once you’ve damaged your reputation by a scandal or bad communication, it can be very hard to rebuild it.

How you come across to the media and online can impact both your personal and professional life. Throughout your career, you can be assured that employers, investors, hiring managers, and potential business partners will search your name online before they make any decisions about you.

This can prove detrimental to your career if they don’t like what they see and almost 50 per cent don’t, according to The Denver Post.

Reputation management is crucial for CEOs, managers, business, and community leaders as well as celebrities and academics.

Here are some tips on how to improve your personal reputation management

Look at your current personal brand and set up goals

Search yourself online and see what people are saying about you and how you come across. Your own individual reputation management is up to you, so do a bit of research on yourself. This is the best way to create goals and plan where you want to be. Your goals should be time measurable and achievable and should steps on how you can complete it.

Participate in media training

Media training is essential for anyone who talks to the media. At Adoni Media’s media training, you’ll learn what makes the news and how to be interviewed through practical exercises that will prepare you for the real thing. Time and time again we see people not prepped with the right key messages when they front the media. This can leave them vulnerable to answering a question that they shouldn’t have, resulting in damaging their reputation. So, media training will help you prepare for anything the media can throw at you, which will help give positive publicity and maybe improve your reputation.

Manage your social media accounts

The use of social media has exploded in the last decade. More and more people are using platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to connect to other people. While this is mostly a good thing, it can also be a nightmare if something negative about yourself comes to light.

Don’t retaliate to bad press

Sometimes the media will publish something negative about you. The worst thing you could possibly do is retaliate, as this can result in damaging your reputation further.  This also goes for online comments. There will be people who write negative comments on you online and might have the urge to argue with them. The best way is to resist the urge to respond negatively or ways that aren’t professional. So, in case of negative media attention, devise a crisis communication strategy plan. This way, you know how to respond to the media and not damage your reputation further.