Social media lets you easily join conversations related to you, your business, your passions and your interests. To ignore social media is to ignore the passionate people of the world who can help you get where you want to be. The first step to tap social media is understanding who is already talking about you online.

To do this, sign up for a Brand-Yourself.com account. After inputting some basic information about yourself, we find and aggregate conversations about you online. We then input them into your personal brand dashboard, which measures the extent of your personal branding efforts.

The Dashboard tracks blog posts that mention you, social bookmarks that mention you, blog comments that mention you, and Tweets that mention you. As new mentions appear, you can confirm them as about your or not about you. Confirmed items about you improve your Hireability Grade,  measuring the strength of your personal brand online.

Find blog posts that mention you:

Brand-Yourself.com searches the web for blog posts that mention your name.

Find social bookmarks that mention you:

Brand-Yourself.com searches the web for social bookmarks (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc.) that mention your name.

Find blog comments that mention you:

Brand-Yourself.com searches the web for blog comments that mention your name.

Find Tweets that mention you:

Brand-Yourself.com aggregates Twitter replies that mention you, as well as recent tweets and recent direct messages.

To get started, simply create your Brand-Yourself.com account and start uncovering conversations about you on the web. Once you discover who is talking about you (or your business or your content), start engaging with them. Reply to them on Twitter, comment on their blogs, comment on their blog comments, ask them what they’re passionate about and send links to articles you think they’d enjoy. It’s never too early to start generating career karma and goodwill among the people who have already taken the time to mention you using social media.

Good luck, and have fun!

1. Sign up for Brand-Yourself.com
2. Confirm items as About You or Not About You
3. Engage thoughtfully with the people whose mentions are About You
4. Log in regularly to discover new mentions
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 to connect to people who can advance your career and life

Check out these related posts:

• Manage Your Online Reputation: 4 Tips to Clean up online reputation for Employers
• How Disengaged Employees Hurt Their Online Reputation
• Part 4: How I Work With My Personal Brand – How I Communicate What I Do
• Personal Brand Management – 6 Steps to Own Your Name Online
• Personal Brand Management – Where to Draw the Line between Personal Branding and Free Speech