Originally published on Linkedin Pulse.  

Whether it's potential customers, business partners, or future employers (or employees), there are many who are doing research behind the people in leadership positions in companies based on all of the information available on the Internet. As an executive or a leader, if you don't own your own brand, others will create their own perception of you based on information out there that is out of your control.

This is why it is more important than ever to be proactive and ensuring that when those seek you out, they find information that you control. The only way to do this is to establish your own digital outposts that will both be found by search engines and reflect your executive personal brand.

Executives don't always have time to be blogging and engaging in social media, so I would like to propose three easy ways to establish a digital executive personal brand:

1. Your LinkedIn Profile (Static Presence)

This is a no-brainer, but I still find many executives who have simply never completed their LinkedIn profile. Assuming that you already have a profile here on LinkedIn, it's really just a matter of optimizing it once and reviewing it every 90 days or so or when details about your job change.

We all know that LinkedIn is the place where decision makers, and as LinkedIn becomes a larger entity as a publishing platform, it will be critical that your profile best represents your branding because of the increased numbers of viewers that will be seeing it.

For all of my LinkedIn profile advice, please read Professional LinkedIn Profile Tips: A Checklist of 17 Must-Have Items. It might take you an hour or two to complete and optimize your profile if you haven't gone through the process before, but it will be time well spent and create the foundation for your digital branding.

2. Your Twitter Profile (Dynamic Presence)

Twitter is one of the most powerful executive branding tools that exists, but it comes at a price: You need to be engaging at a minimal presence regularly for you to derive value out of it. The advantage of having this dynamic presence is that you can be proactively promoting your digital brand on a regular basis inside a powerful real-time search engine.

If you are a content creator you probably already have a Twitter profile, but even if you're not there is still an easy way to manage your profile: Simply share those things that you read and influence you to your followers. This is a minimal way of showing the world what you care about, and in doing so you help establish your digital branding by displaying your thoughts on business issues indirectly through what you read.

If you're looking for some role models to emulate in tweeting, here's a great list of CEOs who tweet.

3. Your dotCEO Website (Static + Dynamic Presence)

I recently blogged about the difference between a dotCOM and a dotCEO website, but needless to say that if you are an executive you should own your own web address. The introduction of new Top Level Domains (in addition to .com) now gives executives the chance to brand themselves through their own domain name - and a .ceo address is the most powerful one you can own. In addition to your LinkedIn and Twitter profile, this gives potential visitors to your digital presence a third option - but one in which you are in the ultimate control over both in content and visual branding.

Outside of the obvious branding advantages inherent in the name of a dotCEO website, I also like how you can easily set up a highly branded look and feel as well as that it can automatically pull in your information from your social networks and drive traffic back to them. In such a way it is an ideal hybrid of displaying both your static as well as dynamic branding.

For an example of what a dotCEO website looks like, please visit my own one here. Here's a quick snapshot if you're short on time:

While the above are the "Big Three" things that executives can and should do to create a robust digital brand, there are many other options as well. What would YOU recommend?

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