When I bought this domain and started this blog, I did so in part to help carve out my little niche on the Interwebz. Although once-upon-a-time, I was eminently Google-able, changing my name, dropping out of grad school, and ceasing my writing/publishing had put a damper on that. As I started to reposition myself as a writer (and as I sought to stake out an online presence as Audrey Watters instead of Audrey Vanderford), I secured this domain to make sure that I had some modicum of control over my online presence. As Evan Roth has demonstrated by positioning himself as the number one search return for "bad ass motherfucker," you can wield quite a bit of power this way.
Question: does this power (the power to manipulate the search engine, I guess you'd say) mean that Evan Roth has successfully branded himself, his website, his persona -- has he achieved "bad ass motherfucker...icty"? I don't know. I mean, maybe he is a "bad ass motherfucker." Maybe he honks at old ladies who take too long to cross the street. Maybe his library books are overdue. Maybe he drinks milk after its expiration date. Maybe he hasn't filled out his census form yet. Baaaaaad asssss, ya know? But the power of Google to label you "bad ass mothefucker" aside, I reckon I'll still think "coolest wallet ever" when I hear the phrase.
Is this branding? I'm not sure. I mean, like me (well not exactly like me, although I do use the phrase "bad ass" in my Twitter profile), Roth wanted to stake a claim for himself online. He has his territory, his domain. And he's optimized it for search engines. In 2010, that might not constitute Branding 101, but it certainly gets you some extra credit.
Well, unless your teacher is Doc Searls who seriously schooled me today with a follow-up post to something I wrote yesterday for ReadWriteWeb. When I found his original posts, they made me think critically about how I'd positioned this site as part of a "personal branding" endeavor. Now that I'm tasked with writing for entrepreneurs, for whom the stakes are probably a lot higher than me as they have to woo VCs while I just get to blog for a living ("bad ass," huh), I figured his arguments would make some interesting food-for-thought/blog post. With the magic of trackback, Searls found my post, or rather thought he'd found it.
Instead, he discovered that a number of splogs (spam blogs) had posted the RWW feed as their own, and oh! the irony, in a post about personal branding, had stripped out my by-line . Har-de-har-har. To add insult to injury (actually I'm damn flattered to have had him respond), he misspelled my name in his follow-up post this morning.
So now, if you Google "Audrey Vanderford," you find one bit of my history. If you Google "Audrey Waters," you find this other little piece of me. And if you Google "Audrey Watters," as a result of this post, you will find "bad ass motherfucker" -- but thanks to Evan Roth's far superior SEO skills, I'm sure I am nowhere near the top of the search returns. So much for personal branding, eh?