Google have just launched Google Sidewiki which uses a browser sidebar to allow visitors to post and read comments about the web page  they are viewing.

Sounds like a great idea, people can visit your web site and leave comments to let those that follow see what they think about you, your opinions or even comment about the way you look.

Unfortunately comments left on sidewiki cannot be moderated, at least not by you which to my mind leaves the whole system open to abuse.

Let’s be honest the world is full of creepy people, deviats, those with malicious intent  and the downright insane but Google is giving those people the freedom to visit your website and leave comments that cannot be moderated by you.

Oh and I didn’t mention the spammers, I would suggest right now spammers who peddle porn, Viagra and the like are licking their lips at the possibilities sidewiki is presenting to them.

So how will sidewiki effect you?

Well if you have worked hard developing your online personal brand, Google have given anyone the ability to attach graffiti to your brand.

Here’s how it works.

1. Download the Google Toolbar (It works with IE and Firefox)

2. Make sure sidewiki is activated.

3. Visit any webpage.

4. Click open sidewiki

5. Post your comment.

Now anyone using the Google Toolbar can see what you have written, good or bad.

To my mind the whole system in it’s current format is open to abuse, web site owners cannot opt in or opt out of the system nor moderate the comments.

Right now I’m saying to myself  ”Google what are you thinking of.”  I’m sure they have a plan for sidewiki that will leave all parties happy but in it’s current format it’s wide open to abuse and will cause real stress for many business owners.

The video below will demonstrate, that using the First Person Branding profile webpage builder, the most technically challenged can create a professional looking web presence in under three minutes from login to completion.

You’ll have the option of using your own personal email address.

For example if your name was John Doe and you owned the domain JohnDoe.com you could have the email address John@JohnDoe.com

This looks more professional than an ISP email address such as johndoe433@myisp.com which is what an ISP may provide you with.

But another benefit of having your own personal email address is it doesn’t matter if you change ISP’s or if your ISP goes broke because such circumstances will not effect your email address as you can quickly host it with a new ISP or web host.

Niether will you  need to contact all your friends and associates informing them of your new email because you would have an email address that never changes. If you think that ISP do not go out of business perform a Google search on a search phrase such as “my ISP went broke” and read some of the horror stories such an event creates.

If you currently have an ISP email address or a free email address such as Hotmail or Yahoo you should understand that you are not self reliant as far as control of your online email communications are concerned. It would be especially risky for you to be building and online personal or business brand using such email addresses.

Google is in the business of trolling the web and indexing all the content it finds, it’s spiders are visiting millions of web pages every day indexing new content.

You can create a Google Alert based on your name ( or any other phrase ) and Google will send you an email as soon as their spiders spot your name on any web page.

This is a great tool to use if you are in the business of creating a personal brand. Hopefully the alerts will make you aware when good things are being written about you but if the situation ever arises where someone is questioning your good name you’ll be made aware of it fairly quickly via a Google Alert.

Alerts are simple to setup, you can do so here

Alerts can also be useful for getting someones attention, anyone who is establishing a brand on the web probably has a Google Alert setup. So if you want to grab their attention just write something about them on your website, they’ll be alerted to what you have written. Just make sure you only say nice things.

I just checked the number of email contacts I have and they out number the number of contacts and friends I have on any of my social networks. It makes sense that you treat email as one of our main tools for helping to create your own personal brand. There are a couple of basic attributes you should setup for sending emails.

First create a personally branded email address and avoid using free email account addresses such as johndoe_1@hotmail.com or john_doe_1@gmail.com because such addresses do not portray professionalism.

If you have your own name as your domain you should setup an email address that looks something like John@JohnDoe.com which looks a lot better and something people will easily remember. You should also create a professional looking signature file which will be appended to the end of every email you send, your email signature could be considered as your profile:

========================

John@JohnDoe.com
www.JohnDoe.com
Senior Vice President Marketing Acme Mechanical
www.AcmeMechanical.com

========================

I’m sure you would agree that this looks a lot more professional than ads you’ll see on the bottom of emails that are sent using free email accounts. Your personal brand is the way that people see you and email is definitely a social network that you’ll use extensively so it makes good sense to gain the maximum benefit as you use it.

If you do not have a Google Account then you can set up one here.

Once you have created the account you should edit your profile adding as much information as possible.

Add personal information to your profile

You can also add photos:

Add photos to your Google profile

… and contact information

Add contact information

Your Google Profile will be carried across all your Google applications and will become particularly important later this year when Google release Google Wave.

Online research indicates that these franchises rely on real estate portals such as realestate.com.au domain.com.au and homehound.com.au to send them prospective buyers for the homes they are selling.

The process goes something like this, a real estate office gains a property to sell, they then pay a listing fee to list the property on the major portals.

Because these portals are used by so many agencies and have thousands of properties listed at any one time, search engines rank  the portals in the top positions in their search results.

Performing this example search at Google “real estate canberra” produces listings that show real estate portals controlling the first page of search results.

Real estate portals now control search rankings so continually increase listing fees they charge agencies to list properties and agencies are starting to scream about the rising charges.

Unfortunately agencies feel  helpless because if they don’t pay the fees and list the properties they lose out to their competitors who are listing. It’s become a vicious circle.

Agencies also find the situation frustrating because they know they are building the portals brands whilst paying to do it.

Let me suggest that franchised agencies do have an option available that would eventually kill their reliance on portals and boost their own brand at the same time.

The solution = Personal Branding

The large franchisors have hundreds of real estate branches and collectively those branches have thousands of agents  all operating as individuals on behalf of the branch.

Those individual agents should be encouraged to register domains and establish websites to be used for personal branding.

The websites could also be used to list properties of clients, publish local real estate news and provide information to prospective clients about the particular agent and the franchise he or she works for.

The agent would also  be  encouraged to link their websites to social networks such as facebook and Twitter.

Eventually this would see a franchise gaining brand expansion through thousands of websites and social network pages.

All these sites would be linking to the official franchise website and branch websites and eventually search engines such as Google would shove those websites up the search rankings. That’s how Google works, they say as much on their webmaster pages. They advise you to create a website with unique content,  gain links and provide links to similar websites. There would be thousands of links being created to real estate franchise websites which would see their search rankings go through the roof.

Real estate CEO’s should be asking their marketing guru’s why such strategies are not in place or be prepared to see their listing fees on a never ending increase. Only competition will drive down fees and they franchises are the only ones who can create that competition

Time is one of the most precious commodities you are blessed with, it’s also irreplaceable, every second that ticks by cannot be used again, it’s gone, literally disappeared into the ether.  So it makes sense to use it wisely especially the time you spend online promoting your brand.

One of the most time consuming but unavoidable tasks you’ll undertake is to spend time uploading your video’s to the different video hosting sites. Transferring just one video to these site can take hours, especially if you are uploading a large file but expanding your brand by video is one of the major strategies you’ll use if you want to successfully brand yourself online so it must be done.

Fortunately the time spent on this task can now be cut to an absolute minimum thanks to TubeMogul which allows you to upload a video to it’s website and then they’ll upload your video to all the major video networks and best of all they will do it for free.

There are over twenty video sites that TubeMogul supports, they range from Youtube to Yahoo and everything else in between. It’s a wonderful service and invaluable for anyone into promotion by video.

Before TubeMogul can upload videos to other sites for you, you’ll  need to have registered for accounts with the other services, unfortunately that’s unavoidable..

But registering will be time well spent compared to the time you will save in the future. We recommend that at the very least you sign up to the following video sites if you haven’t already done so because between them they cater to the highest percentage of the market and have a fairly straight forward registration process.

• Youtube
• Yahoo
• Metacafe
• Veoh

If you do decide to use the  TubeMogul service we would welcome your comments on the service.

If you can lockup your own name as your Facebook username it will become a valuable online asset to you because of the following reasons:

• It will be unique, no one else will have the same username.
• It may become your second most valuable cyber asset next to your domain name, probably the first if you haven’t registered your name as your domain name.
• Your Facebook address will look like http://www.facebook.com/username
• Google will index Facebook URL’s so people will be able to “Google you” and find your Facebook link at the top of Google search results.
• You’ll be able to use your Facebook address to help develop your own personal brand.

Facebook are attempting to prevent cyber squating on usernames by stopping anyone who didn’t have a Facebook account prior to May from immediately registering a username. This is good policy but we’re unsure how they can prevent current users from registering a popular name because allocation will be on a first come first served basis.

When the clock ticks down to registration kick off,  those Facebook servers will be tested to their limits while possibly millions of people try to secure their usernames.

Good luck with yours and be sure you’ll regret it if you don’t try.

Read more at the Facebook blog

I would also like to hear your views on Facebook usernames, please express them in the comment box below.

RSS allows people to have content sent to them as it’s published, they don’t need to keep re visiting a website to see if anything new has been added.

The real benefit of RSS is you can choose to only subscribe to content you are interested in.  News categories are a good example of content that may be chosen. You may want receive news about your favourite sport or stocks.

The benefit  as a publisher is you can create a huge following of readers who subscribe to your RSS feed thereby creating a sphere of influence.

An RSS feed should be the first application you plugin to your website so you can  start building your subscriber list has quickly as possible.