The Google Story In Two Minutes

When I visited Google in June, it exceeded all of my expectations. Here is a well-done and entertaining look at the history of Google in two minutes:

Google + Your Social Networks = Google Social Search

By using the social networks you have claimed in via Google Profiles and your Gmail account, you can see comments, photos and connections from your network using a new labs project called Google Social Search.

In this video, Google's own Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience demos Google Social Search and compares it to the current search capabilities of Google.

Bottom line: If you include your social networks (FriendFeed, Twitter, Picasa, Blogger, etc) in your Google profile, you are giving Google permission to index that information for your Google Social Search results. At this time, Facebook is not included.

You can access this experimental project and others here.

What If You Don't Like What Google Says You Are

When someone googles your name, are the search results positive or negative? Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst of Google, recommends these following tips to manage your reputation online.

The first step in reputation management is preemptive: Think twice before putting your personal information online.

If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to try to remove it from the site where it's appearing.

• Remove the undesired content. It will naturally drop out of search results after Google recrawls the page and discovers the change.
• Contact the site's webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.
• Expedite the removal of that content from Google using our URL removal tool.

Proactively publish information
If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation. You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:

• Create a Google profile. It will show up in the search results when someone googles your name.
• Ask customers who are happy with your company to give you a testimonial to post online.

In closing, maintain your professional demeanor online as you would in person. Only create and post content, including photos and videos, that you want to be indexed permanently by Google.

You Are What Google Says You Are

When I first read the phrase above, it truly upset me. This isn't fair. I was born and raised in a small town in Iowa with a strong sense of community. Your reputation and values determine one's professional worth. It is comforting to go home where everybody knows your name, just like in the sitcom, "Cheers".

Online you are judged by what is found when someone views your social media footprint by googling your name or your brand. The good news is that we have the ability to contribute and influence what is indexed by Google.

If you are interested in growing your professional network and reach, first analyze your current social media impact, digital strategy and areas for improvement.  It all starts with a goal and a Google search.