It’s easy for us as business owners to get carried away worrying about our how our business is doing in the Google search rankings … but what about your personal brand? Over 1 billion searches are performed on names every month! What are people finding when they Google YOU?
(Graphic courtesy of Brandyourself)
What about you? Do you Google potential employees before hiring?
I never really thought about what would happen if I Googled myself, and I don’t really want to. I’m too scared it would be something bad, haha. Maybe if I apply for an important job in the future I’ll do it to make sure it’s presentable.
I never thought of doing it until I saw this post and I did not like what I found. Apparently some guy that lives in Europe has the same name as me and decided to steal cars a few years ago…. hopefully this does not hurt me down the road!
Indeed, branding is not just limited to companies and private companies. Even individuals have their own brand. Our personal brand influences how other people look at us and treat us. I wonder what my brand is.
There are ways to control some of your online information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a section on Surveillance Self Defense. You can have some of your information removed, but you might have to work at it!
Thanks for the lead, MercyL. Will check this out.
I agree. I am just learning about branding myself and how crucial it is to relationship building in business. It’s almost as if your personality is your “brand” because people will remember it.
In these times of internet and social media, you are the brand! It is important to create a name for your self through the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social forums. Like it or not your popularity is often judged by how many Twitter followers you have and by how many “Likes” you have on your Facebook and Youtube profiles. The question is, how is your brand any different than the next. You must determine and execute how you can successfully be outside of the box while remaining current and somewhat trendy. Once you find your niche the possibilities are endless.
I’ve Googled myself before,and mostly just have old profile information from years back on websites. I would definitely Google a potential employee before hiring. I hate to say it,but having a look at their social network and their profiles would give you great insight as to who exactly you’re considering hiring. I don’t know why,I just feel unethical for having that opinion,but its one i have nevertheless.
I love the information I saw when I made a search on my name or on my brand. It also teaches me what image I am portraying through the internet.
I have been thinking about it a few times before and googled myself. The thing is, some of the information that is out there about you on the world wide web , you just can’t erase it in an easy way. Of course, you can try to contact sites or login somewhere and maybe erase some things, but it’s going to take a long time before it’s not visible anymore (if at all).
You can also do something else: deliberately write about yourself in a way that is good for your current and future job. You could write some articles showing your expertise, you could use your name on some ‘high profile’ websites, so that those sites show up on the first pages of the search results.
Do you think employers should also look at personal branding as a means of assessing job applicants or current employees? We should also bear in mind that the veracity of the information in the internet may not be credible. The information may or may not be accurate. The information may or may not be true.
I recommend two sites that let you monitor who is searching for your name in Google. One is Wikiworldbook.com. You set up a profile, and the site gives you information on the IP of the person who is googling you.
The other one is Naymz.com, another profile site that gives you more specific tools to monitor your online reputation, you can know the IP and country of person looking for you, it’s pretty neat.
That is quite true. I have been doing SEO for years now, but if you search for my name, you wont find anything about me. There are plenty of websites that help us with this, and one of them is brandyourself.com. Its a personal branding website, and I have only started using them, so cant place a review here. Anyway, they are free. So feel free to try them out!
I’m neither a recruiter nor a headhunter, but have talked with both, and yes. Most of them do search online before hiring anybody.
It is becoming more and more difficult to keep your personal information out of the public eye. I don’t agree with the idea that I am my company’s brand. No — my company has its own logo, its own slogan, its own address, its own domain, its own bank accounts and its own tax id. We are two separate entities and I think it’s a bad idea to mesh the two together. When I promote my business, I don’t mention myself at all. It is all about the company and the customer.
This is a good insight, FloralFan. Your company brand should be distinct from your personal brand. It will be more complicated if the two will get mixed up together.
Knowing that personal information on social networking sites, especially Facebook, may not always remain personal, people need to exercise far more caution as to what they share. Whether we like it or not, potential employers, clients, insurance companies and others are looking to see what we have posted on Facebook. It’s standard nowadays.
It is so easy to become impulsive with what we share, but we can’t afford to do that, as it can have lasting consequences in the business world. Unfortunately, our personal lives can have a negative impact our professional lives if and when someone Googles our name and makes an evaluation based on what they find.
Lots of people have actually no idea about the dangers of putting some information out there on the web. Just because we’ve made some cool photos shouldn’t mean we should share them on our business account or even our personal ones.
Some information will never be able to be deleted and that is a risk we must take before pushing the “publish” button. And yes, our personal lives will always have an impact on our business. It’s just inevitable.