Owning Your Online Presence

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Owning Your Online Presence

Fred wrote a great post last week about owning your online presence. I wrote a comment on it that I’m upgrading to a post here. It’s best to read Fred’s post first, but you can get the gist in this key quote:

“[Y]ou can’t control what other people do (tag you in photos, post pictures you’d rather not see online, say awful things about you), but you can control what the Internet sees about you by overwhelming it with your social media presence…”

In short: Own your own social media presence by drowning out the garbage with your own content.

If you look at my own behavior, I clearly agree with Fred here. I try hard to own the search engine results page for “Andrew Parker” by blogging, tweeting, tagging, etc…

But, for some people it’s more complicated, such as my father. Even if he blogged every day, started writing columns for multiple national newspapers, spoke at conferences, etc… he’d never pierce the top 10 of the search results page for his name…. because he’s Peter Parker.

The issue here is disambiguation. It’s a hard problem, and doing it well will be rewarded. I imagine the company(s) that will get it right will be the ones with social graph data.