Youtique

Last week I received an invitation from Rob Cuesta to join his contact network on Naymz: empowering reputable professionals. Naymz is an innovative Reputation Network that lets you establish and promote your good name online.

Intrigued, I registered. I noticed that you get a repscore (reputation score) of points awarded for entering information (bio, links to your sites, tags), so I completed the profile section, entered my website, blog and LinkedIn URLs and filled out the tags section. It was amazingly easy and quick to do – the Naymz interface is excellent.

At the time I didn’t realise the significance of the repscore and I thought no more about it until I received an email inviting me to trial the upgrade for a month (allows you to track visitors and monitor your reputation). On Friday I invited my contacts from LinkedIn to join my network (a really simple process as you can just import all your contacts from LinkedIn and then send them invitations. A few clicks and it’s done). I noticed that this increased my repscore quite a bit.

Yesterday I received an email from Naymz informing me that my repscore entitled me to a free premium placement on Google.

Now this is where it gets totally incredible. I did some ego-surfing on Google. The results blew my mind.

• sue brettell – most of the first 50, with a sponsored link!
• “sue brettell” designer – 42 listings, all me
• sue personal branding – 4th of 1.9 million
• personal branding designer – 2nd of 58 million (huh?)
• personal brand strategist – 4th of 860
• Reach strategist designer – 1st!

Woo hoo!!  OK, I’ve got a relatively unusual name. There are  a couple of other Sue Brettells in the UK, one’s a school head and the other’s an archaeologist. But even without using my name in a search, the results are incredible. Obviously my ranking isn’t entirely due to Naymz, but it’s given me a huge boost.

I’m very grateful to Rob, who’s blog is well worth a visit. Naymz is a terrific tool for enhancing online identity and visibility – surely an absolute must for anyone building their personal brand.

Now if somebody clever can tell me how to put the Naymz button in my sidebar – for some reason I haven’t been able to get any badges to appear – I’d be very grateful.