A very useful service, KnowEm, is designed to empower you to proactively identify over 300 online services where either your brand is being used or not. If it is being used, you can quickly identify if you’re in control of it or not and if it isn’t being used, you can quickly establish an account thus preventing future confusion or hijacking of your brand.

We recommend KnowEm to protect your brand. Check them out today. They’re good people.

More information can be found on this press release.

No longer are you stuck with a bunch of different badges from a variety of services in a variety of colors and sizes into your sidebar. Instead you get a professionally designed badge that includes:

• Your name and title just as you have it on your PeoplePond profile
• Your photo from your profile
• Your Identity Verification status
• Chicklets (little icons) linking to your presence at all the services where your blog visitors can connect with and discover more about you.

Some of you will notice this badge follows the same great look used in the PeoplePond Facebook profile badge.

Both the ADAM API implementation and the WordPress widget provide complete SEO benefits by providing clean links from the badge back to your profile and also from the chicklets, helping boost your online personal brand’s SEO and visibility up even more.

To install the WordPress PeoplePond Online Identity Widget, simply search for the “PeoplePond Online Identity Widget” from the Plugins – Add New page and click Install when the plugin has been located.

To install the ADAM API badge on a non-wordpress site, you can call the API directly in one of two ways:

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&widget=yes

http://adam.peoplepond.com/peeps.php?displayName=XXXXXX&mini=yes

And of course, if you still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles, what’s stopping you? Get started now. 

Your friends at PeoplePond have created a personal SEO profile for Santa Claus including links to a few of his favorite charities. What would you do to help boost its rank in search results? Do you have SEO copy recommendations? Have you created some backlinks to the profile? Have you shared the profile with others on social media sites? It’s all good.

And as your reward for helping, you will receive a PeoplePond profile with a free full-service SEO and Identity Verification package subscription for one year (a $99 value) and your profile will be featured in the list of contributors. Check out the complete information and instructions for SEO Santa 2009.

Please blog, tweet, broadcast and share this information with your SEO and social media expert friends and anyone else who can help with this project. Let’s get Santa and some great charities the visibility they deserve at the top of the search results before Christmas Day.

Read the SEO Santa 2009 press release.

The ideal result would be a combination of content produced by the brand intermixed with positive content from other sources. Negative content can hurt a brand given the large number of people that turn to the search engines for information. So it is not uncommon for companies to make an effort to remove such content or actively “push” it down in the search results by promoting positive content using simple tools such our CompanyPond and PeoplePond services or hiring reputation management firms.

Admittedly, we were quite surprised at the lack of brand control these large Fortune 100 companies have over their own brands. Most of the issues can easily be averted with standard Online Reputation management practices.

This study is very interesting as it brings up some familiar questions about “controlling” one’s brands online. First, is it really possible to control how your brand appears online given the ease and freedom the marketplace has to create piles of content about your brand without your assistance or knowledge. And secondly, given this ease and freedom, how expensive and effective would it be to provide a viable motivation for people outside the organization to create and/or promote positive content about your brand? What risk exposures come with such a strategy?

24% of the bad items found seem to be opinions of a single person, versus fact or standard public knowledge.

With so many people available to create positive content around a brand, the above finding seems painfully ironic.

1. improve your online visibility with greater personal SEO,
2. prove your personal identity to your audience, trade partners and prospective contract employers (like, say, the government), and
3. assert ownership over your online presence.

This is one of the problems that PeoplePond.com is trying to solve. When someone from a social network connects with you, how do you know that this particular “John Smith” is the John Smith who you met at the chamber of commerce meeting, or at college?

What?! You still haven’t created your PeoplePond and CompanyPond profiles? What’s stopping you? Get started now.

Speakers are welcome to make use of any or all of these slides within their own presentations.

Best when viewed in full screen mode (click the “Full” icon at the bottom) so you can see the itty-bitty letters.

There are 96 industry categories and each site goes head-to-head with other sites from all over the world in their categories. WebAward judges represent various relevant disciplines and are distinguished experts in their fields. Judges include members of the media, advertising executives, top web site designers, content providers, and webmasters.

While site design is driven by market needs, it is the PeoplePond development team that sweats bullets, endures sleepless nights and wrangles with unforgiving code, vendors, hardware and marketing idiocy to ultimately persevere and deliver the award-winning user experience.

So Al, Barry, Nate and Poem, this one‘s for you. Well done!

You can now protect yourself from identity hijacking and provide your followers with the confidence that you are who you say you are. PeoplePond has introduced the first opportunity to verify your complete online identity. There have been other solutions offered up in the past but they’ve always been lacking the most crucial element, verification of you.

Just because there’s an online profile, social media account or blog and with a person’s name on it doesn’t mean that’s really the person in control of the account. For people looking for advice online or employers and trade partners looking to learn more about a potential employee or vendor, not knowing exactly who is represented where has been a serious concern.

The new PeoplePond service enables you to prove who you are and then display confirmation of your personal identity verification right on your PeoplePond profile alongside your online identity (the places online where you publish).

You can refer your followers to your PeoplePond profile for proof of your identity. As part of this identity verification service, you can also authenticate ownership over the online locations where you publish (social media sites, blogs, social networking sites, etc.).

Stay tuned for more announcements about additional tools, plugins and widgets for promoting your verified identity in the near future.

The ability to assert ownership over social media accounts and other sites has been recently launched on PeoplePond. And now that reach extends to blog sites. Making use of OpenID and OAuth support in the major blogging platforms, PeoplePond enables users to authenticate their ownership of their online content at these sites. Once a blog has been verified, followers will not have to worry about the authenticity of what they are reading.

There’s more coming so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can read more about this in the press release.

As noted in an earlier post, PeoplePond is enabling you to not only prove to your followers that you have proven your personal identity but also you have proven ownership of the accounts listed in the online identity section of your profile. Introduce OpenID into this equation and suddenly there are hundreds (if not thousands?) of services for which you can quickly prove ownership of to your followers.

More details are in the press release.

This is all about trust. Projecting your personal brand and entire online identity from a trusted platform that eliminates any concerns about identity spoofing will give you an added advantage with your followers.

So for those of you keeping count, a PeoplePond profile provides:

• Increased exposure for your entire online identity using a fundemental search engine optimization strategy.
• Advanced personal identity verification (you are who you say you are)
• Far-reaching online identity verification (proving ownership of online assets)
• A trusted platform from which to project your personal brand. 

And there’s more coming.