Do you know what your organization’s online brand is? Potential and current employees, clients, and partners, as well as competitors have most likely all searched for your organization online. Your online brand is established via your own website of course, but it’s more than that—it’s everything that anyone else says about your organization elsewhere on the web as well.

So what are people saying about you? The simplest way to find out is to do an online search. A number of sites allow individuals to review a variety of organizations across industries, such as these:

• Zoominfo.com (offers  comprehensive information on both organizations and key personnel)
• Glassdoor.com (offers employee reviews of organizations’ compensation and work environments)
• Yelp.com (rates organizations based on customer reviews)

Take a look, because no matter how wonderful your own website is, if others are painting a very different picture of your organization, you need to know, and if it’s negative, do what you can to mitigate that.

In follow up posts I’ll talk about how to analyze these search results and determine what if anything, you should do to respond to negative comments or reviews.