Should You Use Your Personal Name or Business Name to Promote Your Startup Business
A question I often get from entrepreneurs promoting their startup business is whether to promote online using their personal identity or business identity. An important marketing rule to remember is that people connect better with real names and faces. What I mean is that if you have a business or provide a service where you know clients on a first name basis and require face to face dialogue, you should definitely use your real name. People trust and adopt a brand much faster if they know the reputation and history of the person behind it.
A good way to look at it is to put yourself in the client or online customer's shoe. Would you be more comfortable speaking online with a user baring the name of the service or with someone using their real name. Your main goal is to bring attention and trust to whatever service you're providing, so networking in a third person greatly reduces the chances of capturing and more importantly retaining those people.
Using your real name as an online username to network has more risk but, it's important to network with other people through channels that have a proven and trusted reputation for security and good results for client service retention. The best online resources for creating networking success through use of your name is social media. For example social blogging and social commenting is an excellent way to promote external brand building. Social media allow you and your startup to have a name and a face associated with it.
This is an excellent approach especially if you have a college start-up business or high school start-up business, and are trying to brand yourself as an expert. The visual setting where you network from does not matter except if you are networking using social videos where clients or potential users can see you and your environment. A name, a face, and a voice will dramatically do more to promote your brand than textual messaging, company name aliases, text only blogging, commentless blogging, and other more anonymous methods of online networking and brand building.
+
Comments
I always use my personal name and image when I'm networking. I want people to get a human to human interaction whenever possible. That's why for example I go to a lot of networking events, where you can shake someone's hand and get new business by talking and convincing people your service is worth it. I also do a lot of the video postings on social video channels like youtube and facebook. People gravitate to you when they see and hear you speaking. It works every time.
I'm a people person. I talk a lot, I go where the crowd is, and I sell myself (not literally speaking). I've grown my startup college business a great deal in a short time because I constantly go after people in an aggressive but polite way to tell them about my service. I although provide excellent customer service once I get their interest. Without it they leave you as quick as they came. The human touch and name networking is the way to go. I personally like to see faces and put names to them.
It's definitely better to use your real name instead of an alias when doing online businesses. Even running a professional blog should include your real name and persona. People are skeptical of vague personalities behind avatars and fake names. They want to know who they're talking to. What's even more important now is getting some crediblity to your blog, if you don't have that the search engines don't want to deal with you. Google for example is encouraging websites to be as transparent as possible to help reduce the spread of spamblogs and suspect authors, so now they're recognizong the rel=author markup on sites using it. Those sites in return are getting better ranking because they appear more credible and trustworthy to the search engine.
Yeah being up front and open about who you are online as a site owner definitely has better advantages in regards to seo and real people.
This one always confuses me because I want people on Facebook and twitter to know and get used to my new business name but I want them to know who's running the whole thing too. Sometimes I use my personal name and sometimes I use the business alias, but if using the personal name is a proven better approach for a newbie business owner like me, then I'll give it a shot