Google Makes Personal Branding Easy
Posted by Erica DeWolf on December 9, 2007
In prior posts, I have emphasized the importance of reputation management in the online world, including both your company’s name, as well as your own name. I have suggested setting up Google Alerts and RSS feeds for your own name or company name in order to stay aware of any positive or negative attention you may be getting, so that you can react promptly and appropriately in order to eliminate negative press and maximize positive press as quickly as possible. This is also related to the idea of personal branding, which is a process whereby people and their careers are marketed as brands.
As pointed out by a post in Dan Schawbel’s Personal Branding Blog, “Your Searchable Brand on Google is Finally in Your Control…or is it?” Google will be implementing technology that will enable users to move results to their keywords up, down, or completely off the list of search results. Based on users’ actions’ on these keyword searches, the order in which the search results appear will change. This will result in a few things: a shift in the importance of search engine optimization. Obviously, it would still be extremely important…if search engines can’t find you, users won’t be able to put you in the first few positions of their search results. However, those who tweak their search engine optimization in order to move from fourth, to the first position, will be wasting their time, as users will be deciding this piece of information.
This will also make it easier for individuals to form their searchable reputation, by selecting those pages that most embody their image to appear first on the list of search results that appear when their name or company name is searched. You can also emphasize your responses to bad PR instead of allowing the marketplace to place your response to bad PR a few pages past the initial bad PR.
Read more here: Google Experimenting with User Voting
What problems can be foreseen with this?
Scott Mahler said
I hadn’t thought of using Google this way. I read your post on word-of-mouth advertisment, and this definitly seems like an efficient way to keep track of what people are saying about you. How do you sign up for these alerts?
Erica DeWolf said
@Scott, thanks for your post. To sign up, simply visit , and under the “Create a Google Alert,” simply fill in your information! I would suggest under, “how often,” you choose “once a week,” as daily may overload your inbox. Good Luck!