The whole field of personal branding is far from a new one, so many of you will be doing all you can to ensure what appears in Google when people search for your name is painting you in the best light possible.
That said however, a new study by Trackur has still produced a surprising result. They asked over 700 people when they last Google’d their name. The results are shown in the pie chart below, but if you can’t wait that long, an impressive 46% of people admitted to searching for their own name in the last 24 hours.
When things were expanded out to a one month timeframe that figure leaped to 73%.
Now it’s worth remembering here that Trackur are a company that provide social media monitoring services, so the people they surveyed for this study can be expected to be amongst the more savvy when it comes to personal branding and monitoring of that brand. Trackur have claimed that many of those polled were not Trackur customers, but still a big question mark hangs over the impartiality.
The full results are included below. How often do you Google your own name? If you do, what do you want searchers to find when they do Google your name?
I might do it now and then if I'm job hunting or something, but most of the time I can't be bothered.
Never I have to say. Should I?
Only if you have people searching for you. Say if you're job hunting for instance or a consultant. If those don't apply then you should be fine.
I check at least monthly!
Are you using any tools to monitor what appears Peter?
No tools, I just type my name into Google search. Do you use any tools?
Not as such. I have a Google Alert setup for my name, but nothing has really come of it.
You know what's funny? I did actually Google my name in the past 24 hours, lol. But I don't do it every day, maybe once or twice a month. I Google my name to see what comes up for me and to make sure that no-one is talking about me negatively.
I trust all was good this time round? 🙂
While I have checked my name on Google maybe 3-4 times in the past couple of years, I have no trouble believing some folks do it this often. I actually had a big discussion with a friend just yesterday about the pros and cons of influence tools like Klout, and in a nutshell, his point was that social media had brought the cult of "me" to new levels, and that our egos were getting in the way of humane communications, as they were once known.
So without redoing that debate, a more egoistic society is indeed synonym with the fact that yes, folks will look up their name everyday or so on Google. Sad, really… but I guess it's the world we now live in. Or is it?
It's a good point Frederic. I'm certain that the rise of Facebook et al has certainly appealed to the narcissist within us, but that is reasonably understandable as the feedback is so constant. Unless you're doing some serious SEO I can't imagine the search results for your name changing massively on a regular basis so I'm not sure of the point of constant self-Googling.
I check it at least every two weeks!
I dont google my name . Just wanna ask all of you .. whats the use if you google your name?