Someone sent a message out to the Twitter community yesterday. It said 'Rob Brown discussed reputation...very interesting - I recommend him to all my followers.' It reminded me that your reputation is NOT:

1. How good you are
2. How much you know
3. How great you think you are
4. What you say
5. How you say it
   

Your reputation is how and how much other people talk about you behind your back! Which is normally quite hard to quantify as it's so subjective. But you can measure it. Here's the story of one scientist's crusade to rewrite the rules of reputation.

Applied to your situation and mine of building your reputation and seeing how far you've come, we learn that it's one thing having followers and connections. It's another thing having those followers and connections rate you, rank you and recommend you.

A network and a reputation are very similar in that they're neutral and inert unless you can leverage and exploit them.

Put another way, your reputation is like your fortune. You've got to do something with it. Having one that just sits there is good for what?

So in measuring a reputation, measure how useful it is and what it's doing for you, rather than actually how much people are talking about you.

Here are some better measures of your reputation:

1. What opportunities it is providing for you?
2. What doors is it opening for you?
3. How much business is it bringing you in?
4. What recommendations, referrals and endorsements are you getting?
5. What influence is it giving you?
6. How much easier is it making your plan for global domination?

I'm off to do some more twittering and some social media interviews with some experts who know what it takes to build solid reputations as the 'go to' choices in their fields. I'll be posting these in coming days.