If You Don't Show Up On Google,
Do You Really Exist?
By Paul Copcutt It has been ten years since Tom Peters first wrote about the concept of personal branding in his Fast Company article “The Brand Called You.” Only now are we starting to realize and embrace the importance of branding for ourselves – identifying and communicating our differences to stand out, get noticed, and secure that deal or be hired for that next great project.
Much the same as branding is no longer just for the large corporations like Nike or Coca-Cola, the same applies to having a presence on the web. You can be assured that as you use the web for research that your business 
contacts and prospects are checking you out online by Googling you, and it is critical to know what is being said—or not being said—about you.
A survey of executives by Execunet reveals that while the vast majority (82%) expect companies and recruiters to enter their name into a search engine during the course of their next job search, one-in-three (33%) have never actually conducted a search of their own name to determine what information about their personal or professional lives exists online.
This is more than just ‘ego-surfing’ to see if you even exist, other surveys have identified that significant numbers of business people are using search engines like Google as one of the first steps in gathering perceptions and knowledge about people that they want to do business with and it’s imperative that you come up in those searches if you want to get ahead and not be left behind.
"it is critical to know what is being said—or not being said—about you."
A survey, conducted by Harris Interactive for search engine Dogpile, said about 23 percent of adult Internet users in the United States have searched online for their clients or customers, workers or potential employees, and supervisors or prospective managers.
So where should you start? It’s a good idea to get a baseline of where your online identity is now. That can be done quickly by looking at your ‘Google score’ and seeing how many hits you have on your name, if it’s a common one then it might take a little more work in sorting through which one’s are yours. If you have no online identity or very little that is okay, its something that can quite quickly be built upon, but if there is digital dirt out there on you then that’s a whole different story.
Bring your ‘Google Score’ with you to MeetDifferent.
Register for Paul Copcutts session - Do You Exist on Google and why Should you Care and find out how you can ensure a positive online identity. In an Execunet recruiter survey of those who use sites such as Google and Yahoo! to check the background of job seekers, 35% have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online – up significantly from 26% just one year ago.
Paul Copcutt is Canada’s leading personal brand strategist and is the founder of Square Peg Solution (www.squarepegsolution.com) and author of “Google ME – 10 Personal Branding Actions to Build Your Online Brand". He will be presenting at the Meet Different in Cancun in February 2010 speaking on “Do you exist on Google and why should you care?” He can be reached at 1-800-810-5116 or via email paul@squarepegsolution.com.