Personal Brand Management

greg | May 13, 2010

You probably didn’t notice, but a couple weeks ago I changed the name of this blog from “Greg and Rachel are Getting Married” to “Greg Baugues and Rachel Lazelle Are Getting Married”.

Small, unnecessarily formal change… right?

If you Googled me prior to the change, the top result would have been a cheesy interview I gave to an entrepreneurial website seven years ago. Our blog was buried half-way down the page.

Why? Because on a site full of information about Rachel and I, only a single page had the phrase 100% of people use when looking for me online — my full name.

By simply changing the name of our wedding blog I created forty pages of content with “Greg Baugues” and “Rachel Lazelle” in the title, establishing our blog as the definitive source for information about us and boosting it to top of search results for our names.

What shows up when people Google you?

Comments
1 Comment »
Categories
Nerdery
Comments rss Comments rss

Remember when websites had counters? It’s kind of like that.

greg | February 11, 2010

In 2005 Google released Analytics, a product to analyze website traffic.  Like most every other product Google offers, it’s free, better than the competition and has become the de facto standard in its class.

Through the web development company I work for, I have access to analytics reports for a number of web properties including some that receive hundred-of-thousands of visits per month.  None of these however, have captured my attention as much as the 300 visits received by the wedding blog I launched three weeks ago.  The numbers just mean more when you can put a name on each of the visitors.

Let’s take a look:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments
Comments Off
Categories
Nerdery
Comments rss Comments rss

Rachel and I met online

greg | January 30, 2010

We’ve probably told you the story about a rock climbing trip with Park Community Church.  And it’s true, the first time we met face-to-face was on a ferry headed into Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin.

But that was not our first encounter.  Our first encounter was in an email chain earlier that week.  Dan Hanson, the trip organizer, sent an email to the five of us who had volunteered to cook for the 40 people coming on the trip.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments
Comments Off
Categories
Nerdery, Rachel and I
Comments rss Comments rss

Engaging with social media

greg | January 25, 2010

(This is a repost of an article I wrote for txilife.com, a blog of the IT and web consultancy I work for.)

I heard a pastor say that when he and his wife got engaged thirty years ago, they stayed up for hours into the night calling people to share the news, waking up many of their friends and family on the east coast.

Within two hours of Rachel saying “yes”, we made 8 phone calls, all to immediate family.  We emailed 20-30 close friends, mostly people living here in Chicago.

And then, with a single post to Facebook, we notified 600 of our friends, family and acquaintances.  This included former co-workers, friends from high school whom I haven’t seen in 10 years, the mother of a kid I used to babysit, and cousins I’ve only met once.

Through Facebook we informed people we never would have contacted had we been required to actively do so.  We did so without intrusion – they received the news at their convenience when they logged into Facebook.  We allowed them to engage with the news at their own level of interest – they could gloss over it, send us a simple “congrats”, or flip through the photo album if so inclined.  And the efficiency of it all freed up Rachel and I to enjoy the rest of our evening.

The whole experience struck me as the most convenient use of social media in my life to date.

Comments
Comments Off
Categories
Nerdery
Comments rss Comments rss
Trackback Trackback

« Previous Entries