If you’re among the social media initiated, chances are you are Googling yourself more than once a day. In fact, you probably have Google alerts set up with your own name to notify you (and your ego) whenever anyone mentions you. It’s ok, you can admit it. As many of us build our digital profiles and publish content online, seeing who else is talking about us has become more than a voyeuristic thrill … there is a personal ROI that is rapidly emerging, and it relates to your personal brand. I have lots of thoughts about personal branding, including something that I’m planning to share very soon which will hopefully be quite useful for any of you trying to build your personal brand.
In the meantime, you might want to check out a site called Addictomatic that I was just referred to by Dave at Rollyo – a site from several years ago that offered the then-unique ability to "roll your own search engine" based on offering search within a selected subset of sites that you could create. Addictomatic is a relatively simple meta search that returns results on a set query from multiple online services. It essentially pulls lots of services through widgets together on the same page – and is not a technically difficult solution … but I like the way they have positioned it as sort of the super charged personal search. If you want to see what the real buzz is about you, visit the site and type in your name to see who’s talking about you on Twitter, videos and photos tagged with your name, who’s bookmarked your content on del.icio.us and lots more. It’s ultimate ego search for the ultimate egomaniacs … bloggers.
Example search for "rohit bhargava":
hi Rohit, just started reading your “personality not included” at the moment. Trying to juggle this and “Groundswell” at the same time. Anyway, love your x and y graph illustrating why personality won’t save crap products. Are you familiar with Innocent Smoothies? They get lots of kudos for their personality and tone of voice, but their smoothies are great too.
Well I do not have an ego problem, or such that I like to admit. But this was a good post that got me thinkin!
Nice site! I’d like it better if it had an RSS feed, though. Otherwise, my google alerts/technorati searches work better for me!
But that said – this works well, and would also work great for corporate brand monitoring.
Thanks for sharing this tool. I’m an unabashed self Googler. I think one of the highlights of my life may have been when Mike Santoro the marketer (me) eclipsed Mike Santoro the baseball player (someone else).
I try and justify it as a way to forward my career, but in the end it’s mostly ego. I’m looking forward to see what you have to continue to build my ego, I mean personal brand.
Paul – just wait till you get to Chapter 6! There’s a story about Innocent Drinks in there …
This is an interesting topic. Im relatively new to all of this and am amazed at the wealth of information there is online. Its a shame more of it can be as clear and concise as yours. Thanks very much, i will check back for updates.