Are you establishing a presence on Facebook?

500 million+ people have created Facebook accounts so there is a good chance you are one of them. If you have plenty of Facebook fans and friends you are in the business of building a personal brand.

But who’s brand are you really building?

Is it your brand or is it the Facebook brand you are building?

I would suggest it is the Facebook brand but maybe you don’t care as long as you are networking your brand via Facebook.

But who really owns your Facebook presence?

Well not you because facebook can delete your account any time they wish to and as far as personal risk management is concerned it’s not an acceptable risk for establishing a personal brand.

But ask yourself this:

If you owned your own domain name and established a blog or website to network your brand, who would own the brand?

You would.

It makes good sense to use your own domain name for personal branding. Your name as a domain should dominate the front page of Google when people search your name. You can use the blog to connect with people and you can link it to your Facebook pages with your domain being the central hub of your brand.

A domain name only costs around $10 year and web hosting around $15 month which is peanuts for the benefits they present.

So take charge of your personal brand and register your name as a domain and start building your blog.

Gary Vaynerchuk must be the king of personal branding, anyone with over 800,000 Twitter followers is doing something right. Gary has embraced social networking and his passion for it bursts through in everything he writes and produces.

Our favourite video is of Gary’s presentation at the Web2.0 Expo NY.

And the power of a personal brand.

Political parties in NSW have been having a lot of fun with the domain name nathanrees.com.au.  Nathan Rees is the Premier of NSW but does not control his domain name. Yes you read that correctly, the Premier of NSW does not own his domain name. Now ownership of the domain name has fallen into the hands of the Premier’s political foes The National Party.

I think the Nationals will be too nervous about doing anything with the domain other than not hiding the fact they now control it.  They are also enjoying that the press are suggesting that the Labour Party didn’t register nathanrees.com.au because they are preparing to dump Nathan Rees as Premier.

This is  a powerful example of why it is important to own and control your own domain. If your name was to fall into the hands of someone who really wanted to harm your good name (your personal brand) they could easily do it.

Eventually you would uncover them for what they are but the damage would considerable whilst you did so.

My parents taught me the maxim “If you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything.” It was a good rule but as I was growing up into the wise old owl I am now I didn’t always follow it and occasionally I’d make a slip.

That’s when another general truth my parents taught me kicked in “What goes round comes round.” That one took me awhile to understand but now I realise they were referring to karma or everything in life is cyclical and will eventually balance out.

Those maxims are even more relevant on the Internet as it quickly becomes a bigger part of our lives and introduces new ways for us to communicate and express our thoughts and opinions.

But one thing you may or may not be aware of is that once you express your thoughts or opinions on the Internet they will be archived forever, literally. This means that if you create a webpage, leave a comment on a blog, participate in a forum discussion, post to Facebook or Twitter, whatever you write leaves your control and enters into some server side database that you have no control over.

An example of a public archive is the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine a project started in 1996 that now has over 150 Billion web pages archived and searchable. You can search the archive and view web pages published years back and may no longer be online, or that’s what the original publisher may think.

So in your quest to create your personal brand my parents maxims become even more important because what you publish will always be available to anyone who really wants to find it.

Remember your brand is what people do think about you and if you make a habit of expressing unsavoury opinions of people, karma will kick in and come back and bite you.  And always be aware of the Way Back Machine and such like because they are probably allies of karma.