As a business executive, it’s important to think about your individual reputation. It’s normal for executives to work in functions outside of their primary company, and to have that freedom, people need to be able to find and learn about you. To achieve that, you can invest in online reputation monitoring and management. It’s a process that will help you appear when and how you want. Improving your reputation will require specific effort in some ways. More than anything else, you want to do well on a handful of sites.
Crunchbase is an online business directory. It’s designed to help people find companies online and learn more about them. Resources on the site can help businesses find investors, market research, B2B prospects, and more.
The first step for using Crunchbase is to ensure you and your business are registered and listed. Your business needs to appear on Crunchbase, so it is easy to find, and as an executive within the business, you should appear with your business’s listing. From there, you can submit data to Crunchbase directly.
It’s easy to see how Crunchbase holds value for CEO reputation management.
AllBusiness
AllBusiness is another information directory, but this one caters specifically to small businesses (500 employees or less). It has articles and small business resources. If your business is successful, it should appear here, and you should be visible as an executive.
You can create a company profile (like LinkedIn for your business) that puts you in the directory. You can also contribute content to the site to improve your visibility (again, similar to LinkedIn in practice). Putting the time and energy into your AllBusiness visibility is a great way to help your company improve SEO results, and it’s one more invaluable resource that builds your professional online reputation score.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is easily one of the most useful websites on the planet. It shows up in countless searches, and despite what college English professors say, most people trust it as an invaluable source of reliable information. Every successful business executive should have a Wikipedia page, but there’s a catch.
You don’t need to rush out and build your page on your own. Instead, it would help if you strived to improve your visibility so that someone else creates the page for you. It’s virtually inevitable once you reach a certain stage of notoriety. Once you have the page, you may want to edit (or have an editor perform it) the page to ensure accuracy and content value.