Before the internet, when someone wanted to get to know you, they’d speak with you or speak with someone who knows you. But when we entered the digital age, everything changed.
Today, when someone wants to learn about you, they’ll put your name into Google and see what comes up. In fact, thanks to a phenomenon called Digital First – a term coined by Mitch Joel in his book CTRL Alt Delete, your online results have become critical. Digital First means that your digital first impression precedes an in-person meeting. There are lots of implications of the Digital First phenomenon. And there’s one that I want to speak about in this post. That has to do with your given name.
When someone looks you up online, you want the search results to be as pure as possible. Purity is one of the five measure of online branding. These five measures define how someone evaluates you online. The other four measures are:
- Volume – how much content there is about you
- Relevance – how consistent the content is with how you want to be known
- Diversity – how diverse your results are with regard to media (text, images, video, etc.)
- Validation – how much content there is in which others validate your self-proclamations
Having a result that’s pure (all/most of the content in the results is about you) makes it easy for those who are researching you to get a clear understanding of who you are. When your content is mixed in with the content of others who share your name, it makes learning about you a little more difficult and can often confound who you are with the characteristics of others.
Uniquely Named People Have an Advantage
When you have a unique name, it’s more likely that your results will be pure, providing a direct pathway for searchers and making their impression more accurate – that is if you have managed your online ID and have made it congruent with who you are in the real world. The goal is to make sure that when someone meets you (whether online or in person) they form the same impression. Dream Kardashian, the daughter of Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna, has a unique name. It’s unlikely that Google results on her name will include the results of lots of other people.
Now for those of you with common names, don’t run to the courts to change your name. That will only create a bigger problem. Then you’ll need a strategy for two different groups to be able to find you – the people who knew you by your former name and those who met you after the change. I have experienced this myself. Although I never really changed my name – I have always been William Arruda – for the first 30-some years of my life, I went by Bill. It was only when I moved to Paris that I started going by William (the French don't seem too fond of nicknames). But of course, everyone who knew me before Paris knew me as Bill – so now I need to manage this and make sure the before-Paris and after-Paris communities can find me. This makes my online branding a little more complex.
Don’t Confuse Unique with Uniquely Spelled
There’s a difference between having a unique name and having a unique spelling to a common name. A uniquely spelled name can actually work against you. If your name is Jain Jones and people don’t know how to spell your name, they’ll type Jane Smith into Google when they’re looking for you – and you’ll be nowhere to be found.
There’s Good News for You, John Smith
It’s probably too late for those of us who have been named to make ourselves relevant to this new paradigm. But we can influence our Google results nonetheless. If you have a common name, and someone performs a Google search on you, they’ll realize that content about you is mixed up with content about others who share your name. So here’s what they’ll do. They’ll add a word or phrase to filter out the other results. People have become sophisticated searchers – that’s the good news. But to make the most of this, you need to be clear on the words/phrases people will use to filter the results – and you need to make sure that everything you post on the web contains those words and phrases. In other words, personal branding to the rescue.
Although it is likely too late to easily influence what we are called without creating other challenges, we can influence how the next generation is named. If having children is in your near or distant future, consider the value of a unique name.
Nominative Determinism
A final important concept is called nominative determinism. Wikipedia defines nominative determinism as the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate toward areas of work that fit their names. Usain Bolt, for example, is one of the world’s fastest runners. A family whose last name is Ayre named their son Billion in hopes that nominative determinism is more than a hypothesis. He’s only in the eleventh grade right now, so his financial fate is not yet known, but just the fact that I’ve heard of him (and decided to mention him in my article) proves that he’s already making a name for himself.
William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and creator of the Online ID Calculator that helps you evaluate your online brand.
