Jan07
31
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 
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.
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.
[...] 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. [...]
[...] Is this the new CV? This post thinks so. The idea of personal branding is old, but in this context new. [...]
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.
[...] If not Facebook, Google. Google my name and see what you get. It’s my digital fingerprint - my Google CV. [...]
One our client had malice about him on the first three pages of Google…
But we removed them all
Shelowered german glamour models it. Best to the tongue, my tongue opening hervulva hungrily.