PRACTICE MARKETING blog

Much ado has been made about our personal brand “Google Quotient” - the search results when folks look us up. I’ve had mixed feelings about it. No doubt we need to have a presence, but how often are people googling our names… or are they really googling other more relevant search terms?

Well, I know people do google me (and people with bosses have to deal with this phenomenon more often). And when people google relevant search terms, they find this blog.

But yesterday morning I got a wonderful compliment. And as a speaker, it will happen to you too:

I was presenting in front of the Independent Real Estate Brokers, a group of uhm… well, figure it out. After my persentation, “From Broker to Expert,” one of the participants came up to me with her smartphone in hand. She exclaimed, “While you were speaking, I googled you!”

While that means she wasn’t really paying attention, I still took it as a compliment. She went on to say, “Wow, you popped right up… I guess you know what you’re talking about.”

Nowadays with the ubiquity of the Internet in the palm of our hands, we definitely have to be conscious of our personal brand Google rank. People will google you to your face, and then talk about you behind your back.

So more important than even having a personal brand web presence, is to make sure it’s all consistent and in alignment with your personal brand character (often this means it should be positive).

It’s amazing how our professional and personal worlds are colliding:  It started with our cell phone number.  Our Facebook profiles are making ‘friends’ out of our ‘colleagues.’

During my activist rallies and media events in college, we used to subscribe to the bumper-sticker philosophy, “The Personal is the Political.”  Nowadays, I suppose, also “The Personal is the Professional.”