Manage Your Online Reputation
A few weeks ago I read an article about a new online service that aims to help you manage your online reputation. I must admit that I was intrigued at the idea of such a service. It’s very clear that this is a growing need for many of us with online presences (good and bad that is).
The Service
BrandYourself.com is the service. They do a great job of taking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and making it surprising simple to make “SEO positive” changes and track the results. Basically you are given a “search score” where you tell their site what Google searches for your name are positive or negative. Then you submit links for their service to track. After submitting links BrandYouself.com gives you several options to “boost” your links. Boosts are simple changes to the links you submitted that make your personal brand/name more SEO friendly.
My Results
Last month I made several changes the site suggested and the results over one month (April-May) were pretty cool. This blog rose 17 positions in a Google Search for “John Cason” & my LinkedIn Profile rose 2 spots in the same Google Search. A one month jump was pretty cool evidence that their service does work.
The changes I made were called “boosts.” Basically they give a percentage point system to every link you submit to BrandYourself.com that track how much you have increased its crawability by Google. It’s kinda like social gaming for your personal brand/name.
Weaknesses
I imagine these will get ironed out over time, but I can’t complete some “boosts.” For example the service tells to change my LinkedIn short url from www.linkedin.com/in/jrcason to http://www.linkedin.com/in/johncason. However someone else has already reserved the “johncason” short url. The site does not recognize that that name is already taken and it will not measure your “boost attempt” unless you do exactly what they recommend. In this case I could never complete that “boost.”
The site offers some basic tips surrounding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in targeting your name/personal brand. One possible downside is that much of their service depends on Google crawling BrandYouself’s users profiles. Google could easily exclude this site from their crawling…This is what Google did to some “content farming” sites a while back. However I highly doubt Google would do it unless the service gets out of hand (ex: such as marketers using it to manipulate Google’s search results.)
What are you waiting for?
With that said, I highly recommend BrandYourself.com. It’s a very cool idea.
Check out my BrandYourself.com Profile to get an idea of what a profile looks like - http://johncason.brandyourself.com/
Warren Buffet says Social Media overvalued. Do you understand your investments?
Warren Buffett said earlier this week on Social Media IPOs (initial public offering):
“Most of them will be overpriced,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said today in New Delhi. ”It’s extremely difficult to value social networking site companies,” he said, without specifying companies. “Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest.” – Busiessweek
This made the headlines of Techmeme and other sites like NBC and Huffington Post.
However I am surprised this was such an important headline as Buffett is known to not invest in industries he does not understand himself. This is part of the reason he has stayed weary of derivative investments and invested mostly in textile, insurance, and more traditional companies.
In fact he has been quoted not being favorable towards IPOs:
It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).
So, when one of the richest men in the world gives an opinion, you should probably listen up and take note. He could be right on that there is a bubble forming around social media companies. But what can you learn from his opinions?
What are you invested in that you don’t understand? Can you explain your insurance plans? Do you know you loan your money to banks for zero interest and borrow back rom them at 18-29% using their credit cards?
Know your investments and financial products you are buying and using… but just my opinion.
How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success
I ran across this cool info graphic today in my Google Reader. It come from KISSmetrics, an awesome web analytic company.
It provides some insight, analytics and case studies into why small, local services should use social media to increase sales…. Very good info.
Here is the graphic from the KISSmetric blog post:
