Is it necessary for businesses and professionals to have online professional profiles to succeed and distinguish? Short answer, YES!
In the ever-changing world of business communications, the one emerging constant has been the internet and the importance of an online presence. In a free-for-all type manner, everyone and everything is now on the internet in a cluster of information. How do you rise above the cluster and stand out for your benefit?
One way people have been able to make names for themselves and brand themselves have been through the use of blogs. While blogs are a very valuable way to get out your ideas in a casual manner, how is one able to market themselves as a professional?
The answer: Social Networking Sites. I’m not necessarily talking about Facebook.com or Myspace.com, but rather sites such as LinkedIn.com, Naymz.com, AboutUs.org. These sites can give one the advantage over colleagues by establishing a presence online as a professional. Social Networking Sites have created a network of individuals looking to find one another in a confusing and clustered internet dominated age.
Futher, these sites can allow professionals to search for one another, find job leads, find client leads, and to promote each other as many of them act as an online resume database.
There is a new product/solution/service that is being launched right now called Social Harbor. This service is designed to bundle certain social networking sites so that they may be easily managed. In making social networking sites easier to manage by establishing a consistent message over the different sites, establishing consistency throughout their online presence.
Businesses could potentially profit the most from professional profile management. If organizations as a whole sign up for this service, they could unify their presence on the internet and create added value with their presence on the internet. It has been said, “the sum of all parts is less than the whole.” Further, organizations could reach critical mass, create optimized profiles for ease and consistency all the while amassing inbound links that will increase their PageRank.
All-in-all, the importance of an online presence is growing and will continue to grow. This is the future of branding and who better to brand than yourself and your organization!
2 Comments
Great post!!!
I totally agree that it is necessary for businesses and professionals to have online professional profiles.
However, making your profile rank higher is not the main goal of the solutions you mentioned, especially if your name is popular/common, say “Mike Johnson” for example. In that case, their are multiple people with that name on LI, and you’ll be lucky to rank in the top 100 search engine results.
I use a new service, called LookupPage (www.lookuppage.com) which aims exactly to that niche. This service in not a social network like LinkedIn or Naymz, but designated for professional users which want to create a web page of their own, that will be visible in all search engines. LookupPage is free, but there is also a possibility to upgrade and get your own domain (you don’t have to pay for that) with sponsored listing to make sure you are found whenever you name is being searched on Google.
For example, you can Google my name or search my name in Yahoo to see that my LookupPage is the first result
In addition, LookupPage also has a solution for companies and corporates to make pages for all their employees. Creating multiple pages under the same company is a powerful and effective tool that can be used to help strengthen the brand of the corporate. As you said, since these pages are connected to each other, they provide one of the key mechanisms that deliver significant search engine optimisation results for the corporate users.
Any search for an employee´s name, or a search for the name of the company itself, will yield top ranking results that display all the LookupPages for all the employees of that company. You can check out some of our corporate users in LookupPagebusiness search.
Cheers,
Udi Drezner
It’s really mandatory in the fast growing online awareness.