Transcription Doc

Monitoring Your Brand

Note: This transcription document is a text version of the upGrad videos present in this session. It
is not meant to be read independently, but can be used to complement your video watching
experience.

Video 1

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

Hello and welcome to the third session of this module - Monitoring a Personal Brand.

Before you begin this session, you may first want you to google your name. What does it show?
Pictures of you on social media platforms, links to your social media profiles or your blogs and
more such results?

Is this what you want others to see? Is this in line with how you expect to be perceived as a
person? If yes, great. If no, you would have surely begun to appreciate why it is so important to
monitor your personal brand. In this segment, we will begin exploring the various reasons why
monitoring your personal brand is crucial.

Speaker: Dr. Bhavna Bhalla

Have you realized that the moment you write something on any brand’s page on any social media
platform, the brand responds immediately. This is because someone from its end is constantly
monitoring its brand presence on online platforms.

Brands want to ensure that they are there for their customers at all times and that nothing
negative is being said or portrayed about themselves and their values.

In a similar vein, your brand is all about you; you are the product here. Your personal brand
stands for your values, your attributes, your key strengths, and anything extra or different that
you bring to the table.

Therefore, if your brand and its values are not being correctly portrayed or are being negatively
portrayed on online platforms, this will have a negative effect on your overall brand and the

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achievement of your goals. People comprehend what they see, and it therefore becomes
imperative for you to monitor your personal brand.

For example, let’s take Pulkit. Pulkit has been actively marketing himself with the goal to seek a
new job in the Data Science team at Uber. He constantly writes articles on related topics, shares
his insights via comments, curates content for others in his network around the same topic, and
also engages and networks with people from the firm, both offline and online.

The Data Science lead from Uber has noticed Pulkit’s articles on LinkedIn and engaged with him
on a couple of ideas around his articles. He found Pulkit’s responses very exciting and suggested
his name to the recruiters at Uber, for a suitable opening in his team.

The recruiters reached out to Pulkit and asked for his resume, which he gladly provided. His
resume was very satisfactory and met all the minimum requirements for the job. So, they called
him in for a face-to-face round to begin with.

However, the recruiters went online and Googled his name to do a little extra research on him.
Unfortunately, they found vulgar and inappropriate pictures that Pulkit had put up on Facebook.
Although that was his personal life, it did not go down well with the recruiters.

Pulkit was coming across as someone who had the right work credentials but was not on the
same page as far as his values were concerned. So, unknowingly, Pulkit lost out on an opportunity
to work with his dream company.

Video 2

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

You just saw how Pulkit lost out on an opportunity to land his dream job. Let’s hear from our
subject matter expert, Amanjot about his experiences on how constant monitoring helped him
achieve his goals and how lack of it acted as a hindrance.

Speaker: Amanjot Malhotra

This is an extremely important point for you. Remember, everyone is watching you on social
media.

I will give you an example of what happened with a person I was interviewing for my team. I was
in hiring talks with a developer fresh out of college, and he said that he had a job offer but was
looking for a better paying one as he was the only one in the family who was earning.

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I found that this was a genuine reason to ask for a hike, and I liked his work. He was also good as
far as his skill set was concerned. But when I visited his Facebook profile, I saw that he was
lavishly living with his family, partying with friends. I realized that I was being duped. At that very
moment, I cancelled the offer I had sent him.

To make a point here, he was wrong, and what he was doing was very unethical. The worst part
was that he wasn’t even monitoring his brand on social platforms. I’m sure he had no clue about
the concept of personal branding, but it should serve as an important example when it comes to
monitoring your brand.

I’m not saying that you can be unethical as long as you can hide it, but rather, you should be
consistent in terms of what you stand for, and this consistency should be reflected across
platforms and offline as well.

So, when it comes down to monitoring my personal brand, every once in a while, I Google myself.
This is one of the best ways to check what shows up about you online. It gives you a good picture
of what others will perceive about you when they Google you.

Earlier, I hadn’t really given much thought to it, but once, one of my friends just pinged me on
WhatsApp with an image of mine which was very old, from early college days. We had partied a
lot, and there were some silly pictures. Someone had put them up on social media.

Basically, they were just making fun of me. But then I realized that whenever I meet someone
new or if I’m going to meet someone new, I often Google them or check out their social profiles.

That’s when it hit me: “I need to clear this out.” So, the first thing I did was to call up my friend
and ask him to remove the picture. Then, I went to my profiles and made a lot of my personal
content private so that it doesn't show up like that. This was a good learning experience; I’m just
glad that nothing untoward happened in relation to the picture.

Apart from constantly Googling myself once in a while, I use a couple of online tools to judge
where I am in terms of my personal brand. On LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index, my score is 80,
which means that I’m in the top 1% of the influencers, and I’m doing really well.

When I started out, it was around 40, and it took me one year of consistent effort to reach here.
The indexes give you a good indication of where you were, when you started out and how your
performance has been.

Video 3

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

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In the previous segment, you learnt the importance of monitoring your personal brand. You saw
how it can make or break your personal branding goals. In this segment, we will look into the
various methods and tools that are required to monitor your personal brand.

Speaker: Dr. Bhavna Bhalla

Remember Pulkit from the previous segment? Where do you think he went wrong? Well, the
answer is pretty simple; he was not monitoring his brand. He put all his efforts in building and
maintaining it, but missed out on the monitoring part. Let’s look at the steps you should take to
avoid such fiascos in your personal branding efforts.

First, you should know everything that is being communicated about you online. To know this,
you should Google yourself and see what comes up. Are there any inappropriate pictures that you
want to remove? Is there anything that is portraying you negatively?

For instance, is there any article that shows you in a negative light. You have to remember that
you cannot control everything that is out there, but you can at least manage it to a certain extent.

So, if you find anything that is objectionable and has been posted by you, you remove it yourself.
If you find something which has been posted by a friend and needs to be removed, you reach out
to that particular friend and have it removed.

Finally, if there is anything which is in the control of a third party platform and you want to have it
removed, you can reach out to the owners to have it sorted.

The idea is to control what is being said or communicated about you so as to ensure that a
consistent and positive picture emerges. Please keep in mind that we are not asking you to hide
your real personality and showcase a false one, but to ensure that there is a certain level of
consistency and professionalism involved.

After Google, you should also go specifically to your social media platforms for a thorough check.

You must have realized that the first thing you do after meeting a new person offline is to check
their presence on social media platforms. Or for that matter, even if you haven’t met the person
but are scheduled to meet them, you will first check their profiles online and try to get an idea of
what they are all about.

Social media platforms therefore need to be monitored on a very regular basis. Once again, the
idea is to remove anything negative or inappropriate about your personal brand on these
platforms and to ensure that there is consistency across them.

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As far as Facebook is concerned, which tends to have a more personal touch, use the privacy
settings to hide what you think is not appropriate on a professional level.

There are many tools available as well to monitor your presence and performance as far as
building your personal brand online is concerned. Let’s take a look at some of these tools.

The first is LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index. It helps you monitor 4 key elements on LinkedIn and
how you can grow your personal brand. It helps you find the right people, engage with them,
build relationships, and establish your personal brand.

The second is BuzzSumo. It is a freemium tool which helps in your content analysis and research
of content ideas for your articles. It tracks which articles and which topics are being shared the
most, which gives you ideas about your content.

The third is Twitter Analytics. It is a free tool that allows a user to track their performance on the
platform. It tracks how a user’s tweets are performing, how many followers are coming in, and
also allows a user to track the insights of their audience.

The fourth is Google Search. We have already performed this exercise in the beginning, and you
must have realized that this tool helps you see how you are perceived by the outside world.

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

There is a plethora of monitoring tools available and new ones keep on coming out from time to
time. So you should keep a check on them and use them judiciously.

Let’s hear from our subject matter expert, regarding the tools that he uses and how those tools
have helped him accomplish his personal branding goals.

Speaker: Amanjot Malhotra

I use LinkedIn a lot for my personal branding; it has a lot of data tools in itself which will let you
know how your profile is performing. You can see the number of profile visits over the last 90
days, the number of followers, and so on. Plus, it has the Social Selling Index that I spoke about
earlier.

For Twitter, I use Kred. It works primarily by assessing retweets, replies, mentions, and follows on
Twitter. I also use Mentions. I use this to track everything that is happening under my name.

One of my articles was published in Ireland, and I had no clue about it. A friend of mine came
across the article and told me about it being published there. Since then, I have started using this
tool. It helps me keep track of all my published work.
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 Video 4

Speaker: Dr. Bhavna Bhalla

Now that you know about all the tools, let’s look at the other aspect of monitoring.

While monitoring allows you to keep track of what is being said and what is being shown, it is just
the first step. The second step of monitoring involves responding to all the communication that is
taking place on all your blogs and posts on online platforms.

You should keep a daily check on your blogs, posts, and any other guest articles that you have
written, to ensure that you are responding to people writing in.

Many people tend to miss out on replying to opinions or queries that come in; this not only
jeopardizes your personal brand and portrays you as a non-responsive person, but it also ends up
affecting the achievement of your personal branding goals.

The trick here is to take some time out every day, which should not be more than 10 minutes, to
check all your communication. If any response is required, then you should allocate further time
and ensure that you respond as soon as possible.

The more you delay, the more the chances of losing out on the engagement opportunity. People
are continuously engaging on different posts and different platforms at the same time; therefore,
if there is no response within a certain time period, they tend to forget it and move on.

Let’s take, for example, Surbhi. Surbhi works with the marketing team of a telecom major. She
wants to move up the ladder in the marketing field to a different firm, which is the leading
telecom firm in the country.

As part of her personal branding, she publishes a lot of articles on LinkedIn, which are all related
to the telecom industry. She then shares snippets of these articles on Twitter, to drive people back
to her posts. She is also a regular contributor to the industry blog telecomblogs.in, which attracts
experts and other people from the telecom industry.

Moreover, she is a regular at offline professional events, where she networks with people from the
industry. It was at one of these that she met the marketing head of the firm she wants to be in.
They both shared their contacts, and he now follows her articles on social platforms.

She also constantly monitors her social profiles and ensures that there is nothing inappropriate
and everything is consistent with her personal branding goals.
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Over a period of time, she has noticed that her blogs are gaining more traction, and people are
writing in. To ensure that she responds on time, she has put in her schedule that she responds
early morning and within 24 hours of a comment coming in.

It was her personal branding efforts that led to engagement with the marketing team at her
target firm. Then, it was her constant monitoring and responses that helped her build a
relationship and land an interview with the team.

There are also certain other factors which need to be kept in mind while responding to and
engaging with other individuals on online platforms.

There is every chance that you will receive negative feedback or comments on your articles and
posts. You need to ensure that you keep a calm head and respond professionally, without
instigating a fight. There will be times when you might even need to stop responding to such
comments. The key is to ensure that you do not spoil or hurt your personal brand.

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

Monitoring one’s personal brand again is not a one off activity. You need to be regular and
consistent. It is similar to building and maintaining your branding communication. The basic idea
here is to keep a check on your assets and then respond appropriately.

Let’s hear from our subject matter experts on how they go about monitoring their personal
branding efforts and look at a few examples of how they have responded in different situations.

Speaker: Amanjot Malhotra

In terms of monitoring, the other issue that often comes up is negative and hateful comments. I
have faced these a lot.

In the initial days, I used to get disturbed by some of the comments, and they even started
affecting my work.

Once, I wrote about hiring a dropout instead of a degree holder, and the degree holder responded
by writing that I hired the dropout because “He was cheap”. I felt really bad about this.

So I checked the person’s profile, the one who had written the comment, and saw that he was
struggling for a job. I realized that it was not him but his frustration that was speaking. I let it go
without any reply, and with time, I have been able to get over how I felt about the incident.

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Over a period of time, I realized that I was thinking too much about these negative responses.
The best way to deal with them is to stay calm and respond very politely. Many people have asked
me why I even bother to reply. They say that I should just ignore them, but I believe that you do
need to reply. You should do so as it shows that you are mature enough to handle any type of
person.

Sometimes, if you want to save time while responding to negative comments, just write back
“Thanks for your feedback”.

Last but not the least, if you find a person who is picking on you to write negative comments, just
do yourself a favour and block them. I have blocked close to 10 regular offenders on my LinkedIn
account!

Video 5

Speaker: Dhaval Doshi

In this session, you first grasped why regularly monitoring of your personal brand is extremely
important.

People often refer to online platforms like Google before or after a meeting with a particular
individual. And they tend to form an opinion based on what shows up on these platforms. It,
therefore, becomes imperative for you to monitor your personal brand online; lest there is
something negative about you on these platforms, you will be perceived in a different light and it
can eventually hamper your hard-earned achievement.

You then learnt how you should monitor your personal brand.

The first step is to Google yourself and see what shows up about you. If there is anything that
needs to be removed, you should do that immediately. If the content to be removed is not under
your control, you should reach out to the owner of the content and ask for it to be removed. You
should, however, remember that you cannot control everything that’s online, but you should try
and control the best you can when it comes to publishing the content that you put online.

The second step is to check all your social media platforms and ensure that everything
inappropriate has been removed and that all the platforms are consistent with each other. You
were then introduced to various tools to monitor your online presence and performance as far as
building your personal online brand is concerned.

Then, you were introduced to the other aspect of monitoring, which involved responding to all the
communications that are taking place on your blogs and posts on online platforms. You need to
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take out time and be regular in your responses; otherwise, you will lose out on valuable
engagement.

Finally, you also saw how important it is to keep calm and respond appropriately to negative
comments that often come on these platforms. You need to be the bigger person and keep your
focus on building your personal brand for the long term.

With this, we have reached the end of this module. Hope you enjoyed going through it. You are
now armed with all the tools to go out there and build your own brand in both the online and
offline worlds. It’s time for you to start your personal branding journey.

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