If You Don’t Clean Up Your Image Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
- Written by Neil Patel on May 11th, 2007
- 18 Comments »
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In an ideal world everyone would know you for all the great things you have done and they wouldn’t know about the bad things that you may have done in the past. The problem is that some people, such as Ted Kaczynski have a tainted personal brand. In some cases it can be almost impossible to reverse the negative connotation with a personal brand, but here are some things you can do to help clean up your brand.
Stop ignoring and start responding
When people start slandering your name your gut reaction is probably to ignore it and hope it dies down. The problem with this approach is that it can lead to people that don’t even know you looking at you in a negative way. Instead of just ignoring the problem you should respond to them in an apologetic fashion and let them know you are listening to them and trying to fix the problem or issue that they have brought up. By doing this you are letting people know that you are listening which might start changing their perception.
If you have had people slandering your name in the past and you ignored it, go back and respond. It is never too late to try and fix your name.
Start doing some good
If you want to have your personal brand looked upon positively start helping others out. This could be anything from volunteering your time at a homeless shelter or simply just helping out people in your industry for free. Whatever the thing maybe it will just help combat the bad perception people have and it will even start creating a positive perception. Just make sure you are being genuine with your actions.
First impressions are the most important ones
Usually if you are branded in a negative way the search results are filled with these negative incidents. The last thing you want is for someone who is looking to learn more about you to search for you name on Google and find results that may look poorly on you. For example, I am known as a princess and when you search for “Neil Patel” there is a result that claims I am a princess. I personally don’t care about being called a princess but if I did I would flood the search results with more positive results. I would create blogs on all the major sites such as WordPress.com as well as create profiles on all the social sites like Netscape using my real name. Then I would try and increase the amount of links going to these profiles which would cause them to rank high for the term “Neil Patel” and would cause the princess result to disappear. 
It may seem easy to flood the search results to improve your image, but it can also backfire. If you create profiles that can be modified by the public such as a Wikipedia entry random people can go in and edit the page to include all of the bad stuff you did in the past. So be careful when doing this.
Stop giving people more ammo
For you to create a positive brand you can’t give people anymore ammunition that will let them talk about your name in a negative way. So whatever you did in the past that caused people to slander you name, make sure you don’t do it again. Sounds simple, but people make this mistake every minute of every day.
Trying to reverse what people think of you isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes much more work trying to go from having a bad image to a good image than actually starting from scratch. This shouldn’t stop you from trying to create a positive brand, but since the damage has already been done you are going to have to put in countless hours and wait months if not years before you see the fruits of your labor.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 10:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow the blog through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Repairing a bad image is one of the most difficult parts I think. Because you have just one name, you should be careful about the choice of technique you use to fight a bad situation.
The best one is to not fight it, but to turn it into a success story like you did with the princess-photo, Neil.
If you don’t care, it’s much easier, but if you feel personally attacked by it, you should probably make a step back and think about possibilities instead of disadvantages.
The headline “Stop giving people more ammo” should be at the top of this article. To me it seems to be the root and the first step to changing your reputation. You have to humble yourself and genuinely change your ways (stop giving people ammo) before any of the other steps to improve your personal brand will have a lasting impact.
Good point Keith, I should have put it at the top.
A “prince” of a post Neil. I look forward to meeting you at SMX.
I looked you up in Wikipedia Neil, it seems you are a “prolific, award-winning American scenic designer.” from Bangor in Wales… at last we know the REAL Neil Patel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Patel
LOL. I don’t have a Wikipedia page on me yet… hopefully someone creates one in the near future.
From: From the Desk of Gang0rraZ
The Internet
Sunday, 8:36 PM
Dear Neil,
I hate to say this but after reading all your posts so far, I could not find any useful information on how to actually make money with fame. I hope you seriously address this in future articles. Keep up the good work!
Your fan,
Gang0rraZ
GangorraZ, I appreciate the input. For week 1 of the launch I just wanted to cover some ways to increase your fame and in week 2 I will get into making money from fame.
Great post as always, Neil. It’s definitely worth it to set up some “Alerts” with your name and other IDs that you should track. I have several Google Alerts set up.
Online reputation management applies not only to your name, it also applies to company names–as well as your ID, such as the the ID you’re using right now in the social bookmarking/social networking communities.
It’s helpful to use the same ID on all the social networking sites since those will contribute most likely to positive pages showing up the search results rather than negative ones.
GangorraZ, you can’t monetise what you haven’t got….
Thanks for another great posting. Your blog should be required reading at all business schools.
I would like to add a comment. A business professor once told me that all the advertising and marketing in the world can’t help a bad product. So, my advice to everyone out there is first make sure you have a great product or service. Then, and only then, market and brand the heck out of it.
@Neil
What is your opinion then regarding publicity. Is any publicity good publicity?
I think that most publicity is good publicity, but not all. To give you an extreme case, if you are associated with being a terrorist that would not be considered good publicity in my mind.
Yeah, that’s an understatement that Ted Kaczynski has a tainted personal brand
I have seen the first one on you Neil, i.e. Stop ignoring and start responding. And I believe this is the must have thing to be successful in any business.
I couldn’t agree more with number 1 - especially if you know you’re in the wrong. If you make a mistake, remember that the Internet never forgets. All you can do is (sincerely) apologize, since your mistake will never go away. Great post, Neil - thanks for the insight.
Personal Branding has now become part and parcel of climbing up the ladder. Nice thoughts on this blog Neil.
Sounds simple… but what if you didn’t do ANYTHING wrong?! I acquired a stalker online. We aren’t dealing with a normal person here. She is a pathological lying NUT CASE. She posts her lies as facts on a daily basis. She FOLLOWS me around the Internet! She has trashed my online selling IDs, websites, family and my employer. She goes as far as to impersonate me. I would have to be on the computer 24/7 to combat her garbage!