I hope you've googled yourself lately. Finding yourself on a search engine is not so much for notoriety anymore, it's critical for your resume. I didn't realize that until I read a recent article published by upladder.com. The title of the article was "The Six P's of Online Branding" by Kirsten Dixson and William Arruda. Solid article that reminded me, "you will be Googled in your job search."
So tonight, I once again Googled myself.
This is nothing new but my problem is I have been searching for Kevin Huff. Turns out I'm a stud collegiate quarterback, Cosmetic Dentist, and actor in the recent Hollywood release, "Dan in Real Life." There are too many Kevin Huffs out there and I don't appear on the first page of results.
Then it hit me - I'm not Kevin Huff on the web because in blogs, my websites, and social networking sites, I've been kevinmhuff for a long time. It's my online persona (consider it my iPersona.) So I changed my Google search to kevinmhuff and Voila! my iPersona, kevinmhuff, is on EVERY link on the first page.
I soon realized if I use both Kevin Huff and kevinmhuff independently, I water down my iPersona and thus my marketability. It is very important to have one iPersona, unless you have the first name notoriety of, say, Seth Godin.
Think about your iPersona. If you aren't on the top one or two pages of your favorite search engine, you might as well not be on there at all. The good news is, we can quickly catch up by finding or creating our iPersona.
Go on, google yourself!
About Me
kevinmhuff on Twitter
LinkedIn Profile link for kevinmhuff
6 comments:
Chris Bertino it is. Now I have to just tie my name into my Blogging site. This is definitely something you want to think about early on. It's a challenge.
Chris Bertino (aka Chrisbie)
Wow, iPersona; what a brilliant concept. I love it. Talk about defining yourself. I need to rethink the way I sign up for things online. Keeping a level of consistency is a sure-fire way to get your name out there. Thanks for the tip.
iPersona! What a concept! I never even thought about this! It is SO true, especially in this new Web 2.0 world. You now have employers looking to see if you have a MySpace page, a blog, a personal website, etc. Moving forward we now must be much more conscious of what we "look like" on the web. Do you want to look like a family man? A learning expert? A visionary? A pervert? (You never know who might have your same name ;-) AND, it may even look just as poorly if you do NOT have an iPersona!
So I googled Jason Bailey and I think I was probably result number 23,456,234. Then I googled JasonB52, my google user name, still "I" was nowhere to be found. Then I googled jasonbbailey...NOTHING!
My iPersona is now jasonbbailey, and I now have 3 search results when googled...all me!!! Now, whenever posting in my blog, commenting on blogs, creating user names, anything at all that pastes my name to the web, it is always jasonbbailey!
Great concept, great blog post. Thanks for opening my eyes, once again.
jasonbbailey
WOW! I had no idea. Thats just silly to me, but I will try it.
I've tried a couple of times to google myself. I've seen my name first once. Now I can't find me at all. It seems alot of people names are oriel lee. I used my initial and then there weren't results any different. iPersona is a good concept. I will definitely have to put my name first.
That is so funny about the whole google thing. We were just talking about that at work the other day and one of the girls had me google my name and it brought up all this random information!! Then we tried are telephone numbers on there and it was sooo weird cause it brought up our name, addresses, and a map of where we lived!! Crazy!
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