Ok, let’s be completely honest here. When was the last time you Googled your own name? Not too long ago, wasn’t it? And how often do you do what they call an ‘ego-search’? Probably more often than you are willing to admit.
Social Media Monitoring tool Trackur asked 725 people if they had Googled themselves within the last 24 hours. The response? A cracking 46% admitted to have done so.
Trackur followed the question up with the question who had Googled themselves in the past month and the number went even higher to a mere 73%. Less than 6% said they had never Googled their own name.
Now off course we are not talking scientific research here, there are not enough answers for that and we don’t know the background of the people questioned. They most probably are more web davy than the average respondents because they are using Trackur.
Next to that we know that not every person who answers questions, especially those when it comes to ego, answer them as honest they could be. But still it is a nice indication of the fact that people do tend to do ego-searches.
Are marketers doing something with this?
The question is, are marketers doing something with this? And would it be all right if they did? I remember not too long ago that a recruiter targeted specific people by placing a Google ad on their name. This off course can be easily done using the Google tools, but it wasn’t received to well in the industry. I am still not sure if that was because people didn’t like to be targeted like this or because of the general averse of recruitment agencies.
I took a quick look at the State of Search blogging team and couldn’t find any targeted ads on any of the bloggers, but there is more you can do than just put up ads if you want to get the attention of someone.
Google Plus seems to be turning up quite a bit in the personalised results, so if you are able to get into the circles of someone your G+ posts might also be visible in the SERPS for those doing the ego-search.
So there are ways to get ‘in the eye’ of people you want to target, but why would you? Next to recruitment I think an important one here is finding the right influentials and becoming more personal. The ‘new way’ of marketing is much more personal than it used to be, so being personal can also be accomplished within the Google result pages.
The big thing is however: if you are too personal or too forward, people won’t like it, so think before you act on this.
