Whether we like to admit it or not, googling prospective clients, business partners, and even new friends is now almost de rigueur before you meet someone in person for the first time. But have you ever googled yourself? If you keep getting passed up for coffee meetings, internships, or business opportunities, it could be because your top google search results contain information about your drunken college life that you would rather have buried beneath your new shiny professional veneer.
Portland-based Vizify, a graphical bio tool for showing the best of you online, is partnering with BrandYourself, an online reputation management service, to make sure that your beautiful Vizify bio ranks higher than the embarrassing Florida mugshot of someone you unfortunately share the same name with.
According to Vizify CEO Todd Silverstein, the partnership was first discussed thanks to a suggestion via Twitter. “A mutual customer of our company and BrandYourself connected us and basically said, ‘you guys should talk'”.
Silverstein sees a complimentary vision in BrandYourself that will be a great match for customers of both businesses. “They have complimentary analytics too,” Silverstein adds. “Together, people will be able to boost their Vizify profiles even further in their google rankings, plus help tidy up some of the other results associated with your name”.
We’ve written about how much we love Vizify before, because of the company’s slickly designed web presence aggregation. Vizify is a graphical bio service lets you easily your online presence by transforming your social media data into a series of infograhics that summarize the best of you to potential employers, clients, or even dates. Vizify’s email signature feature also lets you add a graphic link to your Vizify profile, so that new contacts can learn more about you without having to google your name after they close the email.
But just in case they google you anyway, BrandYourself has your back too. BrandYourself makes sure search engines find and rank your most relevant results at the top, improving your personal brand. The company does this analyzing links to your relevant content that you submit and gives you specific steps you can take to make them easier for search engines to find and rank for your name.
Portland-based Vizify, an alum of both TechStars Seattle and the Portland Seed Fund, has raised $1.46 million to date and currently has 7 full time employees. BrandYourself was founded in 2009 by Syracuse University classmates Pete Kistler, Patrick Ambron and Evan McGowan-Watsonhas and has raised $1.2 million to date.
