Yesterday, Seth Godin had a great story on his blog about a friend looking for a housekeeper and they googled the top three applicants and found undesirable things about them all in about 30 seconds. What does Google have to say about you?
For the sake of this post, I googled myself and of the top 10 entries in Google under my name, 5 are me.
What appears when you google yourself? What does your google results say about Brand You?
When you are applying for jobs, or trying to start a JV (joint venture) with someone, they WILL be googling you, so make sure what they find is favorable. If you insist on having crazy pictures of yourself on Facebook or Myspace, make sure your profile is set to private.
Set up a Google Alert on your name (I promise you won’t look like an ego-maniac, no one will know!) and it will alert you every time someone mentions your name, or the name of someone else who shares your name.
I have Google Alerts set up for my name and my websites names so I know what gets indexed by Google. Twitter appears a lot in my Google Alerts, so make sure you are tweeting things that you wouldn’t mind a potential employer, customer, client or JV partner knowing about you.
This is truly the age of Big Brother, but we all have the ability to become Big Brother, so watch what you are putting out on the internet for everyone (and I mean everyone!) to read and identify as Brand You. With searching and Way Back Machine, nothing is off limits. Share great, helpful info and you will be fine. Post the pics of your bachelorette party, and you may not be.
What do you do if there is incriminating evidence against you already on the internet? You must take control, act quickly and fiercely to bury that information way, way down on the search engine results. There is a great post Surviving Online Shame on The Blog Herald with some tips to follow.
Have you ever been embarrassed by what someone found online about you?
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