Companies are known to Google Stalk prospective employees to learn more about them prior to even contacting them. When someone is in the marketing business, Google is important due to Pageranks for clients. However, it is also important to think about the pageranks for oneself.
Nearly everything you have put online stays online in one form or another whether you delete it or not. Even if it is removed from every server, including the internet archives, there is no telling how many times that information has been duplicated, and if it is stored on personal hard drives. This is one of the most important differences between information, a still grossly misunderstood phenomenon.
Information is not like products, which are purchased pristine and deprecate over time. A physical chair is finite, limited, and easily counted. You generally don't have a half a chair, and although two people can 'share a chair' by sitting on it, that chair cannot be in two different houses at two different times. Information is also not like services. Services generally have a duration or an expiration date of some sort, and usually involve tickets. Public transportation, air plane tickets, concerts, but can also simply involve personnel. A massage is a service, and usually lasts a given period of time. A rollercoaster is a service, as are the whack-a-mole games and similar competitive games where one can win a product. Though there are often also products for sale in a rollercoaster park, and one may receive physical articles such as a map and a guide that reminds them of the park, we can all agree that you would not consider that to be what you're paying for. You're paying for an experience, and you'd be pretty upset if you paid to get into Disneyland and were handed some brochures and were told that at the end of the day, you would just be walking away with that anyways.
So products and services are very different and although the marketing for both may be similar from time to time, there is also something else that we buy and sell regularly, and this one is the trickiest. Information does not only refer to knowledge anymore, knowledge that we hold in our brain. It refers to anything that can be duplicated without loss of fidelity to the original. Information is in a book, but it is the book that you pay for. Though books lose their quality as they are read (dog-eared Tolkein books as evidence), the information inside the book is transferred to the person (analog) or to media (analog or digital) without loss in the original. The same goes for records and tapes, but this media was very expensive, as was the equipment necessary to copy it.
With computers, we have entered an age where information in a strange market. It is highly sought after, but due to easy duplication, it is easily available. An astounding supply outweighs an enormous demand because people can share at very little cost to themselves. Industries that believed themselves to sell products or services have now discovered that they are actually information industries, whether they produced video games, movies, music, novels, applications, or textbooks. Entertainment, education, self-help and experiential markets are all heavily affected by piracy and have developed solutions. Some solutions are inspired and work well with the occasional hitch while others are broken, horrible ideas, such as music DRM.
Even without computers, you can tell one person something and they can tell another person. Your persona, your profile, the information on who you are, all that is information that anyone can copy very easily. If you want to be marketable, much less a marketer, you have to be able to have some effect on the flow of information about you. In other words, don't post stupid wild nights on Facebook and Myspace. Avoid doing stupid things you think others might post about. There's a big difference between enjoying a drink and making an idiot out of yourself. If you do the second, you can't live it down like you used to, and that idiot is going to be the person businesses see.
Now for me this is particularly annoying since I performed a google search on my own name and regularly and search in Canada and come up with a number of tragedies and comedies, none of which I want to be associated with. What is a person to do in this situation? Hope you have a middle name you don't mind so much, or at least, a middle initial. Use it to differentiate yourself from others and should that fail, provide a direct link to your website which can show off your curriculum vitae and link them to the correct sites.
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