Seth Godin said the first thing you should do this year is Google yourself. Loudoun County Assessor Todd Kaufman is learning the hard way that managing your online identity can be often be an unsatisfactory experience.

Managing your online identity is, I suspect, going to be one of the themes we encounter more and more frequently in 2008. This is a theme I’ve touched on many times on this blog over the years (see Take Control of Your Digital Identity) and I believe it’s going to be increasingly critical task moving forward for any small business owner, including the real estate or mortgage professional.

One way this trend will manifest in this industry is, I believe that wary consumers are going to become more and more aggressive in searching out information on the parties they want to do business with.

Google is one way to find information on individuals (and still probably the best). But sites like Spock.com, are part of an emerging class of vertical search sites that focus on specific niches, in this case; People.

Spock’s goal is to allow web surfers the ability to finely tune their queries (a search for “Realtor” in Portland, OR for example) and get individual results on people that match those terms.

Spock also hopes to give those individuals returned in a search the tools they need to control the results that others find. Agents can go on the site, “claim” their identity and then link to the appropriate content they want people to see.

Interesting concept and the reality is that despite all the advances in Real Estate 2.0, finding a good agent these days is still tough.

Not because they aren’t any out there, it’s just there’s no easy way to find them. Sites like IncredibleAgents.com and HomeThinking have tried to make inroads into helping consumers find individual real estate professionals – though neither have gained much traction to date. But that’s not to say that the idea will go away, just look at what Avvo is doing to attorneys.

In the mean time, making sure you stay on top on your own search results should still be priority. Having a blog is a good way to ensure you stay top of the rankings for your name. So is maintaining a profile on SEO friendly social networks like LinkedIn.

The bottom line here is no matter how somebody comes across your name, whether it be from a friend, yard sign, postcard, business card or email, you need to realize that the first step many people are going to take is go home and Google you (maybe even Spock you).

My advice is make sure you’re giving them the information you want them to find.

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Now here’s a widget I’ve been waiting for. Dustin Bachrach’s ShowYourself Widget – which let’s you broadcast and keep track of all your Web 2.0 identities; your MySpace/Facebook profiles, Flickr account, name, etc.

Joel Burslem
		Digg/futureofrealestate
		Flickr/leojmelsrub
		Twitter/jburslem
		YouTube/leojmelsrub
		Last.fm/leojmelsrub
		Del.icio.us/jburslem
		GMail/futureofrealestate@gmail.com
		coComment/futureofrealestate
		Technorati/Joel Burslem
		Blog/Joel Burslem
Get Your Own Widget

There are a couple of notable exceptions on the list – the biggest name missing is LinkedIn, a site that’s growing in popularity amongst real estate professionals. The other big one is ActiveRain, though that’s not really a surprise given it has no traction outside of the real estate industry.

ShowYourself is styled to match the MyBlogLog widget, so if you’re running that it should match nicely. You can also customize the colors to match your site. There’s even an option to host the images on your server which will help deal with the sluggishness and slow load times that sometimes comes with running external widgets on your site.

Reigning in your digital identity is a problem that I think about a lot (see Take Control of Your Digital Identity). It seems daily that I’m trying out a new social network or blog (Vox) or some new form of user generated content tool (Twitter, tumblelogs, etc.). Keeping track of all of them is a huge headache, and invariably some fall by the wayside.

Having a centralized location to gather and store all the data I publish (photos, videos, blog posts) as well aggregating all my profile and contact information from all of these sites, is something I find is currently missing. Something like a Web 2.0 whitepages or digital business card.

How are you dealing with all your digital identities?

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Social networking sites like ActiveRain are the Internet flavor of the month right now. And while I’ve heard lots of good things on the growth of ActiveRain’s community – if you’re like me, you’re probably feeling a little stretched thin at times trying to deal with your Myspace profile, your personal blog, your company blog, your LinkedIn profile etc. etc. etc. One more site to maintain is a little overwhelming.

Ziki.com is an interesting concept that hopes to solve this problem – and is a model I think ActiveRain would do well to emulate for the real estate community. Basically, Ziki aims to become the central clearing house for all information about you on the web. You can think of it as kind of like your own private wikipedia entry.

Setting up a profile on Ziki is fairly straightforward. You can even set up one profile for your company and another personal entry as well. Ziki asks you to tag your profiles with what types content your interested in (I tagged “real estate”, “web 2.0″, “marketing” and “internet”, for example) and what you’re looking in getting out of the network; finding capital, selling advertising, promoting your company, that sort of thing. As the service expands, it promises to introduce you to like-minded individuals.

Once that step’s complete however, you can begin adding your feeds to your profile. You can pull any RSS feeds you currently publish and ziki will compile them together into an up-to-the-minute digest of your own verbosity. Throw into the mix links to your profiles on other sites such as LinkedIn, eBay, Amazon and others and you begin to can create a fairly comprehensive profile of your online presence.

Of course all of this raises the important issue of privacy and whether or not aggregating all of this data on a site like Ziki somehow compromises your Internet identity. My argument here would be that by choosing to participate in any of these online forums you’ve already done away with much of your “privacy”. Just Google your name sometime and see how many results come back (at last count, there were over 12,800 hits for mine). What I like about Ziki, and others like it (Suprglu.com and hopefully ActiveRain), is that they give you a way to reclaim some editorial control on how your identiy is constructed.

I think ActiveRain should begin to provide similar functionality to real estate professionals – in addition to being a blogging platform, it should become a one-stop shop for everything that compromises their Real Estate 2.0 identity.

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