Most Commented Posts
- 1 of 13
- ››
Most Popular Posts
Categories
Blog Posts
Is Your Virtual Alter Ego Hurting (or Helping) Your Career?
There are 3 people in the USA with my husband’s name. If you roll the three versions of George together you have the image of a philanthropic café owning chiropractor who is a bass player in a sludge-metal-punk rock band. Interesting image - but only partially accurate.
In a world where Google is a verb and 45% of firms admit to using social media sites to screen prospective employees, you need to know how your professional brand is shaped by those who share your name. Your unexpected namesakes may be giving you an alter ego in cyberspace, one that might be damaging your professional reputation.
Do you know how many people share your name? Click the HowManyofMe website to learn how many Americans share your name.
From my howmanyofme.com results, I am the only Paula Caligiuri in the USA. This was 1-letter close. In the late 1990's one of my Rutgers colleagues taped a newspaper headline on my door which read “Caligiuri returns to Galaxy”. The headline (I later learned) was about Paul Caligiuri, a professional soccer player, who, at that time, was returning to the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team. Paul Caligiuri is a soccer legend. He is an American who played soccer professionally in Europe (rare) and scored the game-winning goal in 1989 which qualified the United States for the FIFA World Cup (also rare). 
As an aside, in case you are curious, Paul and I are not related – minimally evidenced by the fact that we cannot possibly share any common genetic predisposition for athleticism. I have none. Truth be told, I like basking in the reflected glory of my darn-close virtual alter-ego. Thanks Paul.
What should you do if you have an unexpected namesake who may harm your professional reputation? Here are three suggestions to try:
- Own the domain name of your name. It is not expensive to register a domain name and it will prevent your unrelated namesakes from further altering your professional brand and image.
- Use your middle name or full name to build a separate and searchable professional identity. Build your professional profile around using your full name consistently in anything which may be searchable (e.g., Linked-In).
- Bring it up first, especially if your unexpected namesake is about the same age or in the same geographical region. You can, in passing, mention to a colleague or prospective employer who might search for you online how to identify you. For example, "You should check out my travel reviews online but be aware that there are a couple of Minnie Mouse’s who do these reviewers. I am the Minnie Mouse from California, not the one from Florida. What will consistently differentiate you from the others who share your name?
Do you have a virtual alter ego? I'd love to hear from you and your experience with others who share your name.
Paula
My name is very common, but the only other Scott Andrew Hutchins I've found in a web search is long deceased. I assume the commonaility comes from the fact that Scott is the most common Scottish name, and Hutchinson is a Scottiish name as well (although Hutchins is English--in Britain, names ending in "son" are more associated with the North). One of my challenges as a writer is that there is a Scott Hutchins in California who has written for _Esquire_, and much of the writings I have had published online were credited as "Scott Hutchins" because my supervisor thought that the full name was pretentious. There is a Scott A. Hutchins working in government in Minnesota. I think that the full name has a better flow off the tongue than the name with the middle initial, and I know some opera singers (another field I've dabbled in) who agree with that assessment.
My brother says that there are some websites that make me look bad, but I've found only two. One is an incompetent (as in badly-written) review of a film I've never seen called _Beowulf and Grendel_. (I never review films I haven't seen, nor would I ever say "the film is garbage garbage"). Unfortunately, who ever did write this wants people to think that I wrote it, as they provided a link to my contributor profile on Wikipedia. Then there is the U.S. Army Rangers chatboard where they are chatting about my negative review of _Black Hawk Down_ on Amazon. They can't argue against anything I actually wrote (other than that I called the Army Rangers "Marines," until I corrected it), but they sure love going into homosexual fantasies about what they think I must enjoy so much any notmal person would assume that they're in the closet, as well as making fun of my high school photograph, which I had as my Amazon picture at the time, less than ten years after I finished high school. Obviously, I can't control these, let alone any other of the many people named Scott Hutchins on the web. I think HowManyofMe understimates how many there are, and of course, it doesn't count fictional characters, like the soap opera villain I discovered thanks to the Internet.
Post new comment - - It may take upto 24 hours for your comment to appear