How do you control your image and brand?

Everyone is a celebrity these days; Nombray can be your online brand manager

In this segment, Bambi Francisco interviews Venrock's Venture Capitalist Brian Ascher about how to control your online image and brand. On the Web, consumers, particularly the younger generation, are certainly learning how to take control of their lives. At the same time, they're becoming too transparent, through their presence on the social networks.

Is there a way to control their brand as people become overly transparent?

She interviewed Venrock venture capitalist, Brian Ascher, to get his view.

BF: Thanks for joining us. Talk to us a little bit about how can we control our brand if there is a way to do that.

BA: Right. I think that more and more consumers are realizing that in today's online world, or online life when you go on an interview, you go have a business meeting with someone for the first time, or you go on a date, you're going to get Googled and people are going to form a first impression of you before you even walk in the door based on what they find online.

BF: Or Twittered... these days

BA: Or Twittered. Absolutely.  More and more consumers are realizing that they to need to impact on what shows up on Google or what they see. Nombray is a seed investment we've made that enables you to own your name in the Web. Literally own your name in terms of acquiring a URL that represents you. So BrianAscher.com. And, for you to then very conveniently do something with that. So we all have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere and so you can have those appear as tabs since you've already spent a lot of time investing in the profiles and then add other content to it about you whether you blog or microblog or other interesting things you've been reading, etc. or interesting presentations you've given. So, by doing this under your own URL, this naturally rises to the top of Google rankings and it can't suppress things on the Web that are out there that you don't want people to see but showing up tops in the rankings, it puts a good first impression.

BF: So you're making a bet that people really want to take control and have a crafted version of who they are.

BA: We're making a bet that more and more people are realizing that they are a brand whether or not you're a CEO raising money, you're an individual employee or you're out of work especially, you need to stand for something. You need to show prospects that you have worth, you differentiated, you're smart and valuable and they want to do business with you or  hire you. So this is the theme that is both evidence of Nombray  and also another company called Slideshare, which is YouTube for PowerPoint, which at first you think, "Come on why do we really need a destination site for PowerPoint?" PPT is just a medium for rich self expression and it's amazing the growth rate they've experienced because its a way for people to show what they know. And its a lot easier than blogging in a way because a PPT can have a very long shelf life for years people can refer back to a great PPT whereas blogging you need to do on a daily or weekly basis.