You are nobody unless your name Google’s well.

I recently did a presentation at the Gainesville Underground Tech Conference on just this, Identity 2.0 and it seems that someone other than Dick Hardt and myself have finally picked up on it. Web 2.0 and the internet revolution in general are creating a world where the Google position of your name, the contents of your Wikipedia Biography (or lack thereof) and the prominence of your profile in services like Facebook and MySpace are as important to your online persona as your credit card score is to your terrestrial well being.

Since this is How To Split An Atom, I am going to break down the debate into easy to manage chunks.

The Business Model

People want to know about themselves. As backwards as this seems, it’s becoming absolutely imperative that people are able to find out more information about themselves in terms that once were reserved for corporations.

We now want to know how well we Google, what terms are most prominent for our names and how well we fit into the Web 2.0 matrix. Like my article on SEO tried to describe for creating a blog, people are now trying to SEO themselves to the top of search engines like Google.

Why? It’s good business that’s why. If you run a blog or online business, especially one that is linked to your name, every step closer you get to the top of the Google front page drives proportionately more traffic to your enterprise. According to a Atlas report, for example. Lets say that you received 2000 clicks in position 4. The traffic for the higher positions would look something like this:

Rank 4: 2000 clicks
Rank 3: 2436 clicks
Rank 2: 3067 clicks
Rank 1: 5128 clicks

An increase of 3 positions more than doubles the traffic to your site, on average.

The Wall Street Journal may have said it best,

About 7% of all searches are for a person’s name, estimates search engine Ask.com. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they’d lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.’s MSN unit.

When parents are considering search engine optimization in the child naming process, you know that a revolution is right around the corner.

Yea, you guessed it. There will be a “Part Two” to this article where I answer some of the unanswered questions.