What is a brand’s greatest asset? Its image. A company’s greatest responsibility is to protect its online brand image. With the speed of today’s information sharing, it’s imperative to keep an ear to the online world in successfully managing an online campaign. More and more CGM’s (Consumer Generated Media) blossom every day, and these can quickly spread both good and ill will for your brand.

CGM’s can include blogs, message boards and other user driven platforms. The sharing of information can happen nearly instantaneously in this environment. A recent example was the lead scare in Chinese produced consumer products, including toys.

Successful marketers were ahead of the curve, immediately making changes to their keyword buys as well as editing ad copy on the major search engines. This gave consumers piece of mind in knowing what products were lead free and safe for their children and their families.

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If you’ve visited our blog in the past, you probably know about my narcissistic quest to own the top 10 results in Google for my name. On October 9th I noticed I had gone above and beyond my goal and actually ranked for my name across the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and ASK, having owned the front pages of each. I refer to this as “Search Ego Optimization.” As of today I only rank for 38 of the top 40 results. Bummer.

Stroking your search ego with some minor link building may seem completely self-serving, but, it does have a greater purpose. It helps executive recruiters actually find you! Well, I guess this is still self-serving and you probably don’t want those phone calls anyways. Since stroking my own ego, the number of emails and calls I’ve received from executive recruiters has increased ten fold. I guess if I’m ever unemployed this will help!

You can read more on the value and importance of search ego optimization in my previous post, “Controlling Your Search Engine Resume.”

Do you need Search Ego Optimization services? Does your Search Ego need a boost? We can help. Call us at 646-290-8659

I recently read an article in the New York Times that asked the question, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” The author, Duncan Watts, states that cumulative advantage occurs “if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still.” He says that if in fact people do not make decisions independently, but are rather socially influenced, then predicting hits is impossible no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

Duncan writes, “As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors.”

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I’ll start this post by saying, I’ve been using the internet since CompuServ. Ok, so compared to some of you who have been using the internet since the BBS days and text based multi-player Star Wars games, this might not seem like that long ago. Anyways, during the dot com boom, even though I was only 14 years old, I caught the entrepreneurial bug like so many others. My claim to fame is that I created iTunes before there was ever an iTunes, Joost before there was ever a Joost, and Facebook before there was ever a Facebook. Seriously!

In 1998, I started my first internet business, a Hypermart page selling ‘backup’ copies of music CDs. The page had a list of songs from which the consumer could create a custom playlist to be burnt to CD and shipped straight to the consumer’s door. This was before there was hardware MP3 players (For those interested, the first hardware MP3 player was released in the summer of 1998)! We received 1 order, and the customer submitted a fake credit card number. The site had the worst page design ever, and no audience at all other than five of my closest friends. Failure. Now, there is iTunes!

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Along with networking, your resume is perhaps the most important tool you have to excel within your professional field. Many people just view a resume as a summary of personal, educational and professional qualifications, however, nowadays your resume is much more detailed than you may imagine. In the vast world of the Internet, complete with search engines and spiders crawling the web indexing an ever expanding amount of information, you and others are leaving footprints about you resulting in the creation of your search engine resume.

Your search resume is the search engine results pages that appear when someone does a search for your name or does a search for related personal information. The idea of a search engine resume is nothing new; in fact, this has been discussed fairly frequently. See:

“My Google Resume” over on the FactorCity blog
“This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record” by Quadszilla of SEOBlackhat fame
“The Blog is the New Resume” by Adam Dorowski
“Privacy and SEO” by Scott Reynolds of Agency.com via bl.asphemo.us

and finally, Ozgur Alaz of Marketallica who takes this idea to another level by creating “The First Resume in Google Earth”

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