Blogging Entices Narcissism in ALL of Us

Bloggers tend to read other bloggers so I think the audience to this site is wide enough for me to discuss one bloggers dirty little secret. I do not aspire to fame, but one must bend a knee to this amazing disseminator of information known as a search engine. I am sure I am not the only person that does this, but…I google myself. Yes, I am a googler. I google everything, but often I find that I google things I talk about in this blog and track how fast it gets listed. The answer is… between 5 minutes and a half hour. That’s how long it takes to get the word out to the masses. Simply incredible.

This was ever more evident when I was at a St Cloud Area Chamber of Commerce Chamber Connections meeting and talking to  Ray Cook, the owner of Mi Famiglia Restaurant.  I mentioned that I had reviewed his restaurant for my blog. He already knew that I did. In fact, he astutely pointed out that I said I was going to post a review and never got it up there. (Sorry, Ray, it really is coming!) As a business owner it is in Ray’s best interest to find out what other people say about you and there is nothing more accessible than words on the screen. Its what businesses spend millions of dollars for. The downside is that more often than not what you see on the web is more b*tching than complimenting. It’s definitely easy to find out when you did something wrong and not so easy to find when you did something right.

Back to my self-professed google addiction. I normally google my name, my business, and subjects that I talk about just to see where they fall in listing. There are times that I find my posts about a restaurant actually fall higher than the actual restaurants site. I have found food sites that have linked back to my reviews and the occasional owner has printed our posts and shown them in their restaurant (Thanks Zizzorts!) or told me what they thought of what I said. (I have yet to get any nasty 4 letter words thrown at me.) From a business standpoint, I like to see where the name lands. From a personal standpoint it probably gives me a glimmer of satisfaction knowing that my life is well lived through my civic involvement. Anyway, try googling yourself or your business. Do it often. After all, Edgar Watson Howe put it best when he said, “What people say behind your back is your standing in the community.”

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This entry was posted on July 30, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under Rubish Bin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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