A high school friend of mine was finishing up Medical School and about to start work. During this transition, he decided that it would be a good idea to get a handle on his online image. Patients frequently search doctors by name and he was curious what they would find. Turns out, he shares his last name with a plastic surgeon in Florida who has posted up a variety of before-after images for breast augmentation. As you can imagine, this is not the image that he wants to project to his patients.
He started by searching medical journals for an article on the subject to no avail. Since I’ve worked on websites with several clients, he reached out to me for some advice. As our conversations continued, it became clear that the subject was too large to be covered by a few pointers. Instead, we decided to work together to assemble and promote an eBook on the subject.
A version for doctors is close to complete and I will provide a link when it’s ready.
During the research, it became clear that most professionals would benefit from this kind of advice. Despite a deliberate effort to control my own data, I found out that I had some issues with my own social network privacy settings (click through to read blog post). A few of my other projects have also given me some insight into search engine optimization (SEO). When you search my name, my LinkedIn profile is the highest ranking link relating to me. In fact, it ranks 5th overall even though I have the same name as a former Fortune 100 CFO. In addition, this website has already reached the top 10 (at the time of writing).
With that in mind, I expect to follow up my eBook for medical professionals with another eBook that provides similar advice (and detailed Walkthroughs) for controlling a professional image.
If you don’t want to invest the time to fix your own image, I am putting together a service to take care of some of the basics for you.