Google your name. Right now. I’ll wait.
Good. What came up?
Look at the first page of results and ask yourself these questions about each one:
You need to be able to say “yes” to all of these for at least the top two or three results. (As I write this, the RSSmeme page repeating my Google Reader shared items has crawled above my blog, and I’m upset about it.)
I’m lucky. My last name is very rare, so even if you Google just “Socol” I come in second—only to my father, and ahead of Wikipedia. You may not be so lucky, saddled with a name like Jones or Smith or, even worse, you might have the same name as a celebrity. You may have an uphill battle.
People with common names need to get creative. It can be as simple as adding an initial—my friend became Alec R. Johnston to distinguish himself. Something a little more creative—Lisa Bettany named her blog Mostly Lisa. Or you can geek out, like Ben Lew, who uses the name n0s0ap. (Those are zeros.)
Ben uses the name n0s0ap on del.icio.us, flickr, Last.fm, Digg, Twitter, etc. Lisa uses a combination of “MostlyLisa” and “LisaBettany.” I use a combination of an old name, “UrbaneExistance” (I know it’s spelled wrong) and “JamesSocol” for all new registrations.
But all of us, Alec, Ben, Lisa, and I, make sure our real names are linked to our identities. It’s no Clark Kent: n0s0ap is Ben Lew, with the glasses on or off.
Do you own your own domain name? Why not? Go buy it. Now. Go!
I have this conversation with friends all the time. Would you want someone signing your name on paper documents? Of course not, so why would you let them do the same thing online? I own jamessocol.com, jamessocol.net, and jamessocol.org, just so no one else does. Even if you do nothing but have it redirect to your social network of choice, you should own your name.
If your name is taken, reread the last section and get creative.
Now, about those social networks. You don’t need to be on every one, but get on a few, build a profile, and put your name on it. You can create and control your own Facebook and MySpace pages without knowing a single HTML tag. Once you’ve got a name, whether it’s your real name or something else, use it. last.fm/user/you. twitter.com/you.
The best way I’ve found to control what the web knows about you is to start your own propaganda campaign. Put your name on a lot of things, preferably with links back to your own site.
An easy way to start is by commenting. Blog comments help the most, since you spread that influence around the whole internet, but within MySpace or Facebook posting real, meaningful, interesting comments on profiles and walls will make sure people think of you when they hear your name.
If you have the time, try blogging. There are a lot of blogs with great advice, but you can always just “write what you know.” Once you find your voice, the writing flows.
What else? It depends what you like. If you take pictures, get a Flickr stream. Last.fm is a great way to share and find music you like. GoodReads is a similar site for books. Twitter is great for finding people with similar interests and building connections. LinkedIn is a professional social network, particularly good for people in marketing or new media. Blogger, while not the best blogging platform, has some good community features. There is a lot out there.
Don’t let someone else be you! Own your own identity and be proud of it. It will help you build authority and when a potential employer or client googles you, they’ll get a good idea about you from the first page of results.
What else, 2.0-savvy readers? What did I forget?
Tags: 2.0, authority, identity, social messaging, twitter
One other tool you left out is Google Alerts. I find it is extremely handy to monitor what is being discussed and posted about your brand using GA.
Good one, Ken! Google Alerts are a great tool in general, but particularly for tracking your reputation.
Chris, I keep trying to listen to that podcast and I keep getting pulled away. It’s very frustrating.
Thanks for the mention! The name you use online is becoming crazy important, especially since more and more people are catching on to it making it more likely that we’ll have lots of people competing for the same or similar names.
I of course am an advocate of original names. I’m proud to report that I own every single search result for “n0s0ap”.
I’m the developer of bigsight.org, which lets people create nice looking homepages that are heavily SEO optimized. 87% of our users are at the top of Google and Yahoo for their names.
We make it pretty easy for people to get their names out there!
@n0s0ap: That’s why it’s so important to get these domains. My rule with domain names is “If you think you might, possibly, at some hypothetical point in the future want the domain, register it.” This goes double for your own name.
@Ben Sinclair: Big Sight is a neat idea, but I’d like to see custom domains and a bit more customization (don’t go crazy, maybe just let me re-order the “resume” page, or choose from some pre-screened skin options).
My name is James Socol. I am a web designer and application developer.
I write about accessibility, social networking, design and development. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should look around.
Any ideas expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer or clients.
All original content and design are licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0. Any non-original content is licensed by its creator.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Good post. This reminds me of a SEO 101 Podcast about online reputation management:
http://podcast.neo1seo.com/2008/04/24/negative-reputation-management/