My name is a little unusual among names of Anglo-Saxon descent (or Dutch, I suppose, although I’ve read that my family name has some British roots as well). It’s more unusual than Smith and probably about as rare as, say, Scoble or Dykstra if you forget about the semi-famous people who have those family names.

Thing is, up until a couple of years ago, searches on the name Mark Dykeman would have been just as likely to pick up a guy from Toronto who does information technology work and a guy from somewhere in Newfoundland who is a kayaking enthusiast. Neither of which resemble me, especially not the latter.

As I built up all kinds of profiles for various Web 2.0 services a very predictable thing happened: I started to fill up the high ranking spots in Google’s search results. Today, as it turns out, out of the first 100 Google search results for the term Mark Dykeman, at least 95 of them are references to me. Which, in a way, is sort of neat, especially since there’s nothing terribly embarrassing out there except for some amateurish stuff which is anywhere from ten to fourteen years old.

However, I do feel a minuscule amount of guilt for the rest of these fellows named Mark Dykeman who don’t rank as well as they used to in Google Search. Ok, actually, I don’t feel guilty (at all), I just have this nagging feeling that something’s not quite right. It’s like they’ve been pushed off the face of this earth or else they’re buried in a landfill somewhere, neither of which sounds particularly fun.

The only advice that I can suggest to them is that, by golly, they’d better get busy in social media! Get out there, boys, and create content on all of those Web 2.0, highly ranked sites like Digg, Blogger, StumbleUpon, Helium.com, you name it, and log on as Mark Dykeman. Create a bunch of content, get it indexed, and see yourself rise up in the rankings where you belong!

Oh, wait.

That probably won’t work.

You see, I’ve actually used the username “Mark Dykeman” for virtually every site that I sign up with. Which means…

Hm.

Oh well guys, you’re screwed. Sorry. Early bird gets the worm and all that.

Maybe you could go with your middle names, kind of a David Meerman Scott sort of thing…

Well, in true Monty Python style, you could all change your names to Bruce, just to keep it clear….

EDIT: consciously or otherwise, this post was influenced by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins’s post.

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider leaving a tip to help fund the activities of this blog.

If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!