Personal Branding Online: Part 1 – Your Google CV

This post has been in draft phase for months now, after I promised a series on building your personal brand online.

However, thanks to the sharing magnificence that is Muti, I’ve discovered someone cleverer than me at Lifehack.com has come up with a brilliant post on the same subject and heck – you know me – why re-invent a perfectly good wheel when you can link to it and still look smart :P

The post in question, titled “Reference Check: You Are Who Google Says You Are” is written by Tatsuya Nakagawa and Peter Paul Roosen and offers some wonderful tips toward ensuring that the first 3 pages of a Google search of your name reflect the kind of image you want it to. If it doesn’t, the article offers advice for sorting that out.

Some thoughts to add…

I recently had a conversation with Rich…! about the importance of using your real name in as many digital engagements as possible to ensure a strong presence. You may have a generic name but that’s irrelevant – there’s more than one Tom Peters out there but I guarantee you a Google search will be dominated by that one oke in particular. Trust Google to adequately reflect your hard work and effort online. Use your real name wherever you make a new comment, register a profile (yes, MyBlogLog, Digg, Muti, etc. included – I think this is really non-geeky but uber-important), etc.

Handles are great but from a business perspective, your name pasted all over the Web has weight. Leverage it.

Popularity: 5% [?]

9 Responses to “Personal Branding Online: Part 1 – Your Google CV”
  1. Andy Hadfield 2 February 2007 at 11:44 am #

    You can get really obsessed with this idea. I buy it completely – it was one of the first “projects” africa 2.0 started (click my name to visit site). I counted month by month the instances of my personal brand appearing on google.

    And MOST importantly – stuff drops off. Even all my writing back on gal.co.za – can’t find it anymore.

    So name brand everything. You never know who might be searching.

  2. Dan Schawbel 6 May 2007 at 7:02 pm #

    Always use your own name because the second you don’t, you aren’t consistent anymore. With mixed messages, or clutter, your audience is confused and your Personal Brand will suffer.

  3. Miracle studios -- web design company 16 June 2008 at 8:48 am #

    One our client had malice about him on the first three pages of Google…

    But we removed them all

  4. glamour 28 July 2008 at 7:40 pm #

    Shelowered german glamour models it. Best to the tongue, my tongue opening hervulva hungrily.

  5. lesbian 13 September 2008 at 12:01 am #

    He was that lesbian sex orgy tiny little kid all the process was.

  6. hemen parekh 16 February 2010 at 12:13 pm #

    Text resumes will be around for a long time. Because everyone can type.

    But everyone cannot write a story or a poem.

    So, there will also be a demand for expert / professional resume – writers, for a long time to come.

    But an ever-increasing number of recruiters feel that graphical / visual / audio resumes have an edge over plain text resumes – prompting emergence of job-portals such as

     http://www.VisualCV.com

    which inspired me to come-up with my own

     http://www.CustomizeResume.com

    ( it is easy to be inspired, but , at the age of 77 , difficult to implement ! )

    With regards

    hemen parekh

    hcp@RecruitGuru.com

    Mumbai — India

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. 24.com Lightning Fast Index - Tyler Reed - 22. Feb, 2007

    [...] How accurate are results from 24.com? A simple search for Mike Stopforth reveals that they are not very accurate at all. But wait, let us think again, carefully. Mike Stopforth’s domain ends with .com and we’re searching sites in South Africa only. Now this is something that really gets to me, local search engines can’t distinguish between local content and content from the rest of the world. Even Google’s search from pages in South Africa suffers from this. Mike’s website is clearly full of local content. So it’s clear .co.za domains get preference over any other domain and perhaps others are even ignored, which makes sense, how ever it affects the accuracy of search results. It also affects your online branding. Sure most people in South Africa use Google for searching, but people use 24.com and MWeb search as well. [...]

  2. Overly Social - Too Many Social Netwroks « .oO Tailwind - 21. Mar, 2007

    [...] Is this the new CV? This post thinks so. The idea of personal branding is old, but in this context new. [...]

  3. Why You Should Let Your Employees Use Facebook | Mike Stopforth - 03. Aug, 2007

    [...] If not Facebook, Google. Google my name and see what you get. It’s my digital fingerprint – my Google CV. [...]

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