Playing the name game when it comes to online reputation management

It’s not everyday that I get to introduce Mark Goren. After all, why would I introduce myself? Unless myself is somebody else and that somebody else is Mark Goren of Montreal Canada. Mark is one smart lean mean blogging machine who follows me everywhere.  – Mark D. Goren, President, Point to Point

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Montreal’s Mark Goren

A few years ago, I got a friendly call from Point To Point’s President, Mark Goren. At the time, he challenged me to a cage match to determine Google supremacy. His issue? After I started blogging and participating in social networks, I dominated search results for our name, having booted him from the top of page one.

From a reputation management perspective, this represents an interesting challenge, as it’s vital that you’re confident in your search results so you can join the appropriate conversations.

The problem for Mark and I is less challenging to solve, as there just aren’t that many guys out there with our name publishing content on the web or being written about. If your name is John Smith, though, this could be a more difficult task.

So here’s some help.

To understand where we’re starting from, take a look at the results returned when you search for “Mark Goren”. As you can see, these are clearly unfiltered – there are still results about both of us, and others, if you go beyond the first page.

Now, to identify blog posts, discussion board threads, Tweets, comments and stories that reference you, look to the advanced search features on your favorite engines to help exclude unwanted results.

Using Google, here’s what you can do:

• On Google’s homepage, click on “Advanced Search” to the right of the “Search” button.
• On the “this exact wording of phrase” line, type in your name
• On the “any of these unwanted words” line, enter all the terms you want to filter out

Using our example, I entered:

• P2P
• PointtoPoint
• “Point to Point”
• “Mark D Goren”

(Note the use of quotations on the last two terms. This will help ensure that results that contain these words in this exact order are eliminated.)

If you were typing this directly into a search box, this is what that would look like:

“Mark Goren” -P2P -PointtoPoint -”Point -to -Point” -”Mark -D -Goren”

Now take a look at the results. Clean, filtered and, most importantly, relevant to me. The benefit? I have more time to evaluate and join conversations, because I don’t have to sift through irrelevant information.

Of course, these are just some tricks, which ones do you use? Mark?

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