Ken’s Sandbox

My favorite weekend morning pastime is catching up on my on-line reading. This weekend having read everything Seth Godin has read in the past 8 months or so I wandered over to ChangeThis where I found a manifesto (that is what ChangeThis calls them) on personal branding.

The timing is serendipitous. For the past couple of months I have been thinking of ways I can help clients build their own personal brands. Until I read this manifesto I had only Googled myself once that I can remember and had not really paid very close attention to the results. I did it again and it wasn’t until the second page that anything relevant came up. It seems I have a fairly common name with some prominent owners.

So, I Googled a few client names. A couple fairly distinctive names came up with only 9 and 13 results all to their web sites. Another, fairly common name, returned 9600 pages but the agent’s personal web site came up first in the results. Yet a third name that should have been fairly unique had the misfortune of also having prominent competition.

Do you think prospective clients Google you before they list with you? Do you want them to. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of personal branding for real estate agents. Let them Google you. Better yet, encourage them to Google you and start creating the top rated results pages that they are going to find.