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It is no secret that you have to be in charge of your own online personal brand: The image and message you convey to the world will stay with you forever.

If you put anything on the internet you can safely assume that it will be searchable and viewable forever.

With employers, vendors, friends, and potential co-founders all googling you, you need to be very aware of the all of the different channels in which your life is being streamed out over the internet (and off the internet).

Manage your privacy settings

Those party pictures you have publicly shared on flickr and facebook are seen by the world (even after you have deleted them). And that is ignoring the fact that you are legally giving facebook (and others like it) an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works. Whoa. That is a litigious mouthful.

While that facebook clause is atrocious it doesn't scare me too much.

What you really need to worry about is managing your privacy settings on these social networking and media sites to ensure that the only the right people see the 'right' information about you.

That means tweaking your privacy settings and levels before creating and uploading content.

Manage your profiles so they are consistent

Your Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Monster, NotchUp, and many more like it, should all have consistent messaging. Employment and personal information should be consistently written across all these websites, and provoke a similar emotional response from any reader or visitor (Branding is all about that emotional response -- connecting with people on a human level).

Taking time to ensure all profiles are in a consistent state takes time but you should dedicate the time towards doing it. Turn it into a process: If you update one -- update them all.

Hopefully someone will invent a product to make managing profiles (social and business) across multiple networks and websites. (Think ping.fm -- a tool for updating social network status messages and notes -- but for profiles).

Be aware of your social "voice"

Tools like twitter and friendfeed are changing the entire web experience.

The web has become a real time platform where all the activity of your social graph is visible, commentable, and viral.

Since all of these tools expose RSS feeds which can in turn be aggregated by any number of sites, your posts and microblogging will appear in many more places that you intended (especially if you start developing a following).

Many of these services can permit you to be totally drunk in a bar at 4am in the morning and post to the internet from your mobile. That message may be out there forever. It is the 'drunk call' supreme.

AJ Vaynerchuk has some great ideas about how to protect your personal brand on microblogging sites like twitter and friendfeed.

Get the number one rank in Google for your name

It does not matter if you own the site or not. If your Linkedin profile can get up to the number one slot, then so be it. The key here is to control the CONTENT and the MESSAGE on that first results page.

I'll admit that Jordan Willms is one of the easier and more unique names to score the #1 spot. I awknowledge that "John Smith" is going to have a harder time than most.

And best of all -- buy your own domain name (if you can).

I tell people all the time to purchase theirname.com, but few still take the initiative. You need to secure your eBrand these days or it will come back to bite you. There are billions of people in this world and many share the same name (John Smith, etc). This means that once an alarm goes off in their head, they will purchase their domain name ahead of the others. When this happens, they get placed first in Google and have protected their reputation.
Source: Personal Branding Blog

Wrapping it up

Being aware of your personal brand is important to many aspects of your life: To business, to love, to finance (Are we really that far off from creditors googling us?).

In order to establish a strong personal brand you need to work hard, you need to add value (and not just create useless noise) and try to connect with people on an emotional level.