In Northern California’s commercial real estate world, it’s difficult to attract media attention. This applies especially to social media novices and new commercial brokers who do not have a long career track record. More often than not, the quest to gain media attention, followers and social indexing is described as tedious and time consuming.

Building an online brand is not easy and it takes work, yet it’s possible to achieve some online branding success by following a few easy steps, once or twice a week for 15 or 20 minutes.

That’s just what a group of brokers at Cushman & Wakefield’s San Francisco office set out to do as they rolled up their Brooks Brothers sleeves and began establishing and monitoring their online brands more enthusiastically.

The brokers collaborated by launching a monthly small discussion group to cover the basics of building an online presence in the Social Stratosphere – a collection of the elements, tactics and online platforms necessary to enhance an online presence. These include regularly engaging with LinkedIn, Twitter, content sharing, commenting on blogs, promoting your company’s thought leadership, posting on SalesForce’s Chatter and, whenever appropriate, thinking outside of the box.

C&W San Francisco calls the sessions “Social Media Basics” and the topics center around the fundamentals of promoting one’s thought leadership online. The groups are very small, to encourage open discussion and immediate feedback. A large screen monitor assists in providing hands on, visual guidance to help understand the concepts being presented.

Google Yourself
Have you dared to type your name in the box and hit Search? Try it. Google – the world’s most commanding search engine – leads its users to a powerful online trail. Your interactions on the web – LinkedIn posts, blog comments, sharing links on social platforms – are indexed by Google and become part of your digital fingerprint. It’s important to pay attention to this, because this is your brand.

Below is my own Google Indexing after I type my name into the search query. Most of the time, your LinkedIn profile and regular participation in a reputable blog will rise to the top of the search results.

The first page of your personal indexing is critical. This is where people will form an online impression of you in under 10 seconds. Sometimes this impression will get you the new assignment or impress a potential client.

Please keep in mind, when you do a Google search on yourself, the results are affected by the fact that you are using your own computer and are signed into your Gmail account. Your regular search habits and actions on Google will always affect search results. Use a computer you have never used before to get a more accurate list of your personal indexing, without signing into Gmail.

Take a read through some easy to implement action items that can be used by anyone to gain more online search engine popularity. You can download these steps here for your own use. These are not advanced concepts and do not take up a huge amount of time to execute, but it’s important to implement them regularly.