Last night I gave a talk to the brilliant Digital Surrey group about Me and My Web Shadow, the slides from which are (practising what I preach) now available on SlideShare.

Kerry from Dell has kindly shared her notes on her Posterous if you want to read a bit about what was said…

It was a really wonderful evening, as there was a lot of debate and interesting questions and I was sorry when  I had to leave the post-event pub meet-up to get bck to Brighton. If you live in the Surrey area you should definitely consider getting along to one of future Digital Surreyevents.

Thanks especially to The Blue Door PR, who organised the event, helped me sell a lot of books (thanks to everyone who bought one too) and are a formidable team of organisers/make-things-happeners…

: : Bonus link: James Firth has written a (very kind) account of last night’s talk and builds on some of the themes with his own perspectives and experiences…

: : New link: Paul Marden has shared his thoughts on talk and sharing at hisOrcare blog.

]]> http://meandmywebshadow.com/2010/09/slides-from-my-digitalsurrey-talk-last-night-me-my-web-shadow-slide-show-edition-antonys-posterous/feed/ 0 http://meandmywebshadow.com/2010/08/how-get-ahead-your-web-shadow-by-pr-boss-stephen-waddington/ http://meandmywebshadow.com/2010/08/how-get-ahead-your-web-shadow-by-pr-boss-stephen-waddington/#comments Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:24:03 +0000 Antony Mayfield http://meandmywebshadow.com/?p=233 At a PR industry summer conference Me and My Web Shadow got honorable mentions in a presentation by Stephen Waddington (a.k.a. @wadds to his Twitter connections), managing director of top London PR firm Speed Communications.

In the presentation, Stephen gives advice to people working in PR about how to look after their online reputation as a kind of “live CV” (North American reader note: CV = resumé) and how this can help them progress their careers and find new jobs. Even though the presentation was written with PR and marketing people in mind, the advice could be followed by anyone.

As well as summarising some of the advice from Me and My Web Shadow, Stephen also talks about Ben Cotton‘s concept of Personal SEO (search engine optimisation), which gives some good technical detail about looking after what Google says about you.

You can take a look at the whole presentation (which has been showcased on the front page of presentation sharing service SlideShare) below:

Open University blogger Tony Hirst posted today about an interesting way he had of seeing what his “Google impact” was: the automatic Google Suggest service which tries to anticipate what you might be searching for. You’ll notice it especially when you are typing a phrase into the Google home page and it is based on what people most commonly search for.

Tony’s Google suggest profile is pretty long:

My own shows that people looking for me are most often looking for my blog or my Twitter profile:

Tony goes on to thinking about how you might measure your Google impact:

So what ingredients might go into a “Google Suggest” Impact Factor?

Number of correct mentions? Number of incorrect mentions? Explicit association with host university, or subject area?

And what might a Google Suggest Factor measure? Personal discoverability? Personal associations? Personal specialism areas?

In the comments to his post, someone called  R3beccaF suggests a measure based on combining your name with your profession or another qualifying phrase to gauge the size of your Google shadow:

In terms of impact that you can add to your promotion case, number of times you come up in a search for “your name” “open university” could be useful, because it removes all those references to Hollyoaks, Lemonrock and, in my case, the X Factor:
“tony hirst” “open university” – 3500
“martin weller” “open university” – 2890
“grainne conole” “open university” – 3600
“martin bean” “open university” – 14800

Both of these approaches are useful ways of looking more closely at your web shadow on Google. It will give you a sense of who else with your name is out there, how you might differentiate from them and give you a sense of scale.

Comparing yourself with someone famous in terms of shadow size isn’t that useful, so try a peer or colleague as a comparison to see how you’re doing. This will be especially interesting and useful as an exercise as you grow your online presence.

Image: Working on the final edits of Me & My Web Shadow in the Intelligensia coffee shop in Los Angeles

Today is the official publication date for Me and My Web Shadow in the USA, where it is being published by Bloomsbury USA.

I’m thrilled that the book will be available in the US, where I spend so much of my time these days.

If you’re reading this in America and have a copy – let me know what you think… even more importantly, if you could leave a review on Amazon.com or elsewhere I would be very grateful. There are some great Amazon reviews on the UK Amazon store and they are really helpful to people deciding whether to buy or not.

If you would like to get your hands on a copy, the ads on the right of this page will take you to the appropriate Amazon store, and it is widely available in US book stores.

And, of course, Me & My Web Shadow is available on the Amazon Kindle platform, so you can read it on Kindles and indeed your PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad. Also, if you are a Sony Reader owner it is available for that device.