The Brand of Me
I attended LaunchUp, a monthly meet-up for people interested in tech startups, last Thursday. My friend Josh Coates, Mozy founder, spoke first, where among other things he described the two types of people at the event: people who have done, are doing, or are planning to do a startup, and people who like to talk about it but are too chicken to do it.
I’m definitely in the second category.
Of course, Josh’s talk was the most interesting, in case he reads my blog. But the second talk, DJ Waldow’s talk on community management, was interesting too, particularly to me as someone who’s tried (and failed) to start an effective online business. It wasn’t so much that there was any one particular point that Waldow made that really stood out to me; rather, the more he spoke, the more I realized how important what he was saying really is: In order to compete today, businesses have to be active in managing their online reputation and in creating awareness of themselves among their customer base. The ultimate? When your presence in the community and the industry is so prevalent that when they think of your business area, they think of your business.
Since I don’t have my own business, I am my own business. So this made me wonder, how well am I doing? How synonymous is my name with the software engineering industry, or other things?
Since I know how incredibly interested you are, here’s a detailed table of my findings. For each term, I conducted a search on both Google and Bing.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan”: Searching for just my name is pretty disheartening. No results relating to me in the first twenty pages on either site. It doesn’t help when you have the same name as a pro football player and a musician. I don’t even show up on Wikipedia’s Matthew Ryan disambiguation page. Hrrmm.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan blog”: Not much better. No results for me in the first ten pages on either site.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan homepage”: Finally, a result. Google gave me a result for www.mvryan.org, my homepage, on page 9 result 9; Bing, oddly, gave their first result for me for my user profile page on Novell’s developer website, from back in my days working for Novell’s developer services team.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan software”: Now we’re honing in. Google’s fifth result on their first page was for my developer.novell.com profile page; Bing gave two results for me on their first page; the third for my LinkedIn profile, the eighth result on that page for my user profile on SourceForge.net.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan software engineer”: Google showed me love twice on page one, results three and seven, but Bing really showered down their devotion by giving me five results on the first page. I got top billing with the first result on the first page, along with results four, six, seven, and ten.
Bing really seems to be favoring me more than Google, but surely that’s not because I work for Microsoft; it must just be a coincidence. Anyway, it seems I’m fairly well associated with my profession, but there’s definitely still some work to be done.
Some other searches:
“Matt Ryan Microsoft”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 2
“Matt Ryan Mozy”: Google, page 1 results 2-6 (oddly, the first result is for a Matt Ryan on the mozy.com blog but that isn’t me, even though I worked for Mozy for a year); Bing, page 1 results 1,2,3,5,6,9
“Matt Ryan Novell”: Google, page 1 results 1-6, 8-10; Bing, page 1 results 1,2,4,5,8-10
“Matt Ryan Eclipse”: Google, page 1 results 1,3,5,7; Bing, page 1 results 1,4,6,8,9
“Matt Ryan IBM”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 results 1,10
“Matt Ryan Spillman”: Google, page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 result 1
“Matt Ryan utah”: Google, page 2 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 1
“Matt Ryan 350z”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 3
“Matt Ryan world superbike”: Google, page 1 result 1 (and 2, and 3); Bing, page 1 result 5
“Matt Ryan supercross”: Google page 1 result 9; Bing, page 1 result 9
“Seeping Matter”: Google page 1 results 1-4,6,8; Bing, page 1 results 1-4
“Coding Frogs”: Google page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 results 1,2
Interesting. Perhaps you shouldn’t even try to build your brand around “matt ryan,” because the name is too common and not unique to you. Look at what Mike Moore has done. Michael Moore the filmmaker pretty much owns “mike moore”, but check out this search: http://www.google.com/search?q=blowmage
I think Mike has built his personal “blowmage” brand pretty well.
@Tad
Good point. Although, even without proof I would have guessed that Mike’s personal brand would be stronger; he’s done a pretty good job I think.