Louis Halpern's View

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that allowing players to engage with fans online in the right way can have for the Manchester United brand, especially in light of their current financial challenges. People respond most passionately to other people online, and Twitter provides such a huge opportunity for teams to really tap into their fan-base support. A more progressive approach would have aimed to educate players about Twitter and other social media platforms and put in place common sense guidelines for their usage, harnessing the positive opportunities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Wide awake at 4 in the morning for the third night in a row, I knew the idea that was niggling at me wasn’t going to go away. I’d have to see it through.

I was inspired to put pen to paper – that’s quite a challenge for me, as the team I work with know; my dyslexia makes it a challenge to write down what I’m thinking articulately. The excitement about helping people harness the explosive growth of search engines, for their own personal empowerment won.

How we find the information that is important to us has changed dramatically over the last ten years. We now live in a world where the internet and search engines dominate our business, personal and professional research. How we are seen by others can be enhanced or degraded in an instant and our personal brand, whether good or bad, can be now globally amplified.

In addition, the ability of an individual’s ‘personal copyright’ to be heard is being diluted by the vast amount of information that is thrown at us daily. Being visible to the people that matter to our professional life – our prospective or existing customers, clients or employers – is becoming harder and harder. Welcome to the brave new world of personal reputation management, where you can be in control of how you are perceived online and can create, plan and executing job hunts, new business drives and all manner of professional and personal projects in a way that was until recently, impossible to achieve

It’s pushing forward these possibilities that have driven me (and my co-author Roy Murphy) through plenty more sleepless nights and days. I want to help you redress the balance. Nearly one year on, I feel the results have been well worthwhile and we’re awaiting the first delivery of our Personal Reputation Management printed book. The whole book eboook is available now from reputation-book.com or the first chapter is available free.

I’d love to hear your feedback about personal reputation management – making the internet work for you – and how you have implemented some of our strategies and tactics.

I hope you enjoy the book, and find it useful, practical and inspiring.

Some of you make know that I’ve been writing a book with Roy Murphy about Personal Reputation Management.

It’s nearly there.

It’s being self published so we’ve sent a draft to the printer to define the format of the book.   The three formats are coming back soon then it will be time to commit the first few thousand copies.

Here’s a quick peak at the cover of the book.

We’re going to make it available in multiple formats.  Obviously the printed book, but also various ebook formats.