Before we set off on our voyage of discovery today I want to give you a bit of background as to why I am writing this article. I have found myself of late being adviser to a lot of people setting up facebook pages for lots of different reasons. Rather than repeat what I have to say ten times I am going to try and summarize it. Where possible I am going to use the Go Beyond MLS page as an illustration.

Now I should also point out that I am not a guru at this sort of thing but a really enthusiastic geek. With that in mind let us look at setting up pages.

What is a page?

A page is a blog.

Don’t look at me like that a page is basically a cross between twitter and wordpress. For plugins you have applications and instead of tweets you have posts with attachments.

All the basics of blogging apply to your page. We will talk about this in a moment. First some basics to make sure we have not missed anything.

Making the page

Most of you that read this article will know how to make a page already but for those that don’t this is the quick version.

1. Go to a page (the Go Beyond MLS Page is good).

2. At the bottom of the left hand column you will see a link that says “Create a Page for My Business” (this link leads tot he same page).

3. Click it, fill out the details and there you are a page. It has no fans (not even you) and is ready for customisation.

Getting the basics in place

There are some things that a page needs before you even make yourself a fan of it. These are simple that it is easy to overlook them.

1. Upload a picture. In fact if you got as far as making the page and did not have the perfect logo then you need to stop whatever you are doing and get one. Now.

Your picture is your only branding that you get. Everything else looks exactly as facebook wants it to look.

A good image can be as tall as you like but is limited in width. Take a look at the Lord Matt fan page (and become a fan perhaps). You will see that it has a customised image that fills down the page and adds my character to the page. I also get to make the public speaker and blogger points boldly while getting two pictures of me on the one space.

If you do not have the skills to make such an image then a photograph might do. Just remember whatever you use had better be yours to use.

2. Put something short and snappy in the about box.

Treat this like the most important tweet you will ever send. I like to end with a call to action (suggest to friends).

3. Find something worthwhile to say for all the fields under the info tab.

If the fields on the info tab are very much not what you need and do not fit in the slightest then you are not to late to delete the page and try picking a better category. Make up your mind now because it’s the work of ten minutes to change things with no loss if you change them now.

Okay assuming that you stick with your current settings write that “about” section and make sure you make it good.

You have around 100 to 300 words before people have to click to see more so just like blogging you must capture people’s interest within as few lines as possible and then keep it. If it takes days to get the “about” perfect then that is what it takes.

4. Consider making the about tab the default landing page because your wall is not going to be very interesting to start with.

There are more advanced things you can do like adding new tabs that people land on but for now let us just stick with the info tab.

To make it the default landing page you are going to have to click “Edit Page” which is found just under the image you set a while back. Get in there and make some changes.

5. Consider making the default for the wall both fan and page so that it is as much like a basic facebook profile as possible.

You can do this when looking at the page proper.

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The easy access to the internet and freely available publishing tools offer wonderful opportunity to just about any one to get your word out there, to establish your brand, to grow your business, to promote your charity and even find your love.

These same tools combined with anonymity can become a real nightmare. A lie aimed at destroying your reputation can quickly, some times in days, propel to the top of the search engines for your own name. It takes much longer to clean up the mess. In fact, the vicious postings on Yahoo! Answers that I was subjected to back in February are still cached by search engines even though Yahoo! Answers had deleted them long time ago. Although they no longer appear on the first page of results for my own name.

So what can you do to protect your name and your reputation. Depending on your involvement with the Internet and how much time you have, you can probably learn how to make more difficult for your enemies to carry out their some times most evil attacks on your reputation. Following are few things that I have been doing lately, that may help you as well.

1. Join online communities and if possible link to your profile from your websites and blogs. It might be difficult for you to do if you are not particularly involved with any online communities. But if you are a member of MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, StumbleUpon, Facebook or even if you use Twitter build up your profiles and link to your profiles from your own blogs and websites. With the time, these pages will rank well for your name making harder for faceless creeps to propel pages that can damage your reputation to the top of the search engines.
2. If you happened to have more than one websites or blogs consider including (if possible) your name in the “about” page. Again these will be the pages to beat should any one tries to use the internet to attack you.
3. Set Google Alerts for your own name. This will allow you to catch the unwanted staff early on, before it would begin to appear in top results on the search engines.
4. You might want to befriend a lawyer who understands the nature of the internet. Some times you will be able to remove unwanted material by writing the the websites administration. However there will be cases that your attorney’s help might be required.

Depending on your popularity or how much your enemy hates you, this can easily become almost a full time job. Unfortunately not every one has time to be engaged in the above described activities. In fact during past 6 months, I have fallen behind on many projects precisely because of reputation management activities. And let me tell you, it can be disheartening.

For the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating to start using Reputation Defender. Below is the video from 20/20 about the case involving the death of Niki Catsouras and how the pictures of of the car crash had become a nightmare to Catsouras family. The Reputation Defender was involved in the case.

Disclosure: The above post is not a legal advise nor should it be viewed as such. The link to Reputation Defender in the last paragraph is an affiliate link, if you sign up after clicking through that link I will receive commission for referring you to Reputation Defender. If you don not want that to happened you can use the following direct (not affiliate) link www.reputationdefender.com to visit their website.