SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com in perpetual beta

I got the most awesomely creepy email from academia.edu this morning…

“Hi Sarah,

Someone just searched for you on Google, and found your page on Academia.edu.

The search term they used was:

“sarah glassmeyer university of kentucky”

Follow the link below to see your page in the Google results for this term:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=sarah+glassmeyer+university+of+kentucky&aq=f&oq=

To see all your keywords, follow the link below:

http://uky.academia.edu/SarahGlassmeyer/Keywords

To delete this keyword from your Keywords page, simply follow the link below:

…..[redacted]

Thanks,

The Academia.edu team”

Who was looking for me???  A long lost love?  A homicidal maniac? Some combination of the two?  Oh…it was probably the student loan people.

Now, obviously this was an advertisement/awareness campaign for academia.edu members to update their profiles and link their profiles to their other web presences.  (Linking the profile makes it appear higher in the search results. Why? It all has to do with how google works.)    But it reminded me that I haven’t googled myself in a while.  You do google yourself, right?   If not you should, especially with conference season coming up.  (I know I’m not the only creepy stalker type that googles people after meeting them.)  It doesn’t mean that you’re self absorbed..it just means that you like to keep aware of how others  perceive you…a useful thing to know even if we’re not talking about the online context.

Okay, everyone go google themselves right now.  I’ll wait. And don’t forget the image search!

You back?  Okay.  Did you like what you saw?

If not, there are some things you can do about it.  My buddy Greg Schwartz speaks a lot on personal branding.   In a talk at Internet Librarian 2008, he included six tips for maintaining your  online brand.

1. Have a homebase.
2. Own your username.
3. Aggregate your lifestream.
4. Join the conversation
5. Follow what others are saying about you.
6. Be authentic.

In addition to that, I’m a big believer in having a unified avatar across sites. Now, again, not everyone is as self-involved comfortable putting pictures of themselves on the Internet as I am.  But I think if you use at least a humanoid avatar of yourself, it helps you become more “real” to the people interacting with you on the Internet.  Also, it becomes a recognizable symbol of yourself that people can associate with you, sort of like how 5 year olds are able to spot McDonald’s Golden Arches from a mile away.   Initially when I became active in social media, I used a picture of myself in a knitted cat hat.  (I now use one that plays upon that image.)  It never ceases to amaze me how much attention that’s gotten me and how much people associate me with cat ears.  Since summer in DC is too hot for knitwear, I’m contemplating getting a cat ear headband to wear so people recognize me at AALL.  So, I guess be careful with your chosen symbol, is that point of that story.