Controlling your Brand

Wanted to share a few thoughts with you about brand control.

  • What Google has to say about you matters – whether you like it or not. As a model (or photographer) people are researching you on the Internet. You should know (and have some influence over what it says about you. That’s controlling your brand.
  • Are you represented consistently across the internet? Are all your various profiles up to date? Do they feature consistent work? Are you consistently active on them all? Does a visitor get the same impression of you whether they visit Facebook, Instragram, Model Mayhem etc? That’s controlling your brand.
  • Are you monitoring sites and groups where industry people communicate, collaborate and share information? That’s controlling your brand.
    Because at the end of the day if you don’t control your brand – someone else will.

Ensuring your brand is controlled and consistent online can have a huge impact on your career.  It’s important that you have awareness and control (at least as much as possible) over how you, your work and your reputation are represented on the Internet.  All good thoughts, right?  We think so.  The how-to might be your next question.  Fortunately, you’re in luck – we’ve got a some ideas:

  • Monitor what people are saying: This can be a bit daunting – monitor the popular places for the industry.  Facebook groups, Model Mayhem, IG, etc.  Worry about the places where the big traffic tends to congregate. Google Alerts another great tool – it’ll scour the internet for you and send you an email. All these different sites and services are commonly referred to as channels.
  • Actively request reviews from those you work with (especially if you have a Facebook page).  This is an excellent way to cultivate a reputation people can see…and it’s free.  If you don’t have a Facebook page consider one (we can help with that too if you’d like).
  • Claim your profile/name on popular websites: Part of controlling your brand is doing what you can to make sure you have control over your name on popular websites people use (so someone else can’t present themselves as you).  Faceboook, IG, Twitter, Model Mayhem, OMP. You may also consider other services like YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Make sure the name you use is the same/consistent across all your channels.
  • Determine your online presence model: You need to have a plan for how you link everything together, keep it updated and consistent.  Ideally without managing ALL of them separately.  Leverage technology where possible to share content over multiple sources.

MMS recommends what’s called a “Hub and Spoke” concept.  This concept centralizes one Internet source as your “Main” source (the hub) with all your other profiles being a “spoke” off of that main source.  Wherever possible you’re driving content to your spoke sources from the hub.  A visual representation of this ideas would look something like this:


You may opt to not have as many spokes – or maybe some of your spokes are different.  But this illustrates the general concept.  My Modeling Site can help you with the website portion and we can link your site with a variety of social media channels so content is seamlessly shared across channels with a single post.  In some cases, it’s sharing content FROM your site to other channels, in other cases it’s the reverse. You can use our Personalized URL option or, to really stake a claim of internet property, you can purchase a domain name (We recommend GoDaddy – but you can use any registrar out there).

Why us as opposed to many of the other website builders out there?  A site from MMS will provide you greater flexibility, far more feature options, less cost of ownership AND we’ll even do all the set-up work for you if building sites and technology isn’t you’re thing. You can learn more about our service here.