Have you Googled yourself recently? If not I advise you to do so. Because whether you like it or not, the ubiquitous search engine is telling a story about you – and it might not be the one you want to tell about yourself.
If you’ve got a common name you’ll be able to hide in plain sight but I don’t have that luxury. Not only do I have an unusual name (I’ve yet to find another Beverley Glick in the world), I’m also a published writer and journalist, so it’s not hard to find stuff I’ve written or that has been written about me.
Now that I’m also a coach I’m putting myself out there more, so I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and a few other membership sites as well. So, far, so fine. But what story is Google telling about me today?
The highest ranking story, right at the top, is a piece I wrote for the Sunday Express in 2009. So, if you Google me, the first words you will see are: “Andy Walker and Beverley Glick met on an internet dating site”.
With one click you can find out quite a lot about a chapter of my story. You can read it now if you like, but if you can wait I’m going to talk about that more in a couple of days’ time.
Next on the list is a link to the blogs I’ve written for Rock’s Back Pages, a brilliant archive of rock writing, which holds a number of the articles I wrote when I was a music journalist. That covers several chapters of my story, from 1979 to 1993.
Third place goes to Google+, which I only joined about a month ago and hadn’t got round to doing anything with. When I saw how far up the listings it was (and that shouldn’t be a surprise really), I filled in a few details because I realised I was missing a trick.
After that are all my other social media profiles plus an article I wrote for the Telegraph about Royal Ascot. I don’t think many people look at the second page of listings, but if you did you’d find a site dedicated to the band I used to sing with in the late 70s, and a mention of a book I’ve written that has yet to be published.
Because of the way search engines operate, I have some work to do to get my Pearl Within website and this blog further up the listings, but even so Google is telling a fairly consistent story about me and my life. And the fact that I met a guy called Andy on a dating website.
Why am I telling you all this? To make a broader point about personal narrative. It’s better to have control over the story people read about you, so be discerning about what you make public on the internet. If you don’t want to be an open book, check your privacy settings. Don’t let friends tag you in embarrassing photos. Make sure you’re happy with all your public profiles.
If you don’t have much of a presence online and you like it that way, then congratulations – you can carry on hiding. But the way things are going, I doubt you’ll be able to do that for much longer. Personally, I choose to optimise my own story so that Mr Google doesn’t do it for me.
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