The D-Ring

For those who don’t know, I am working on my Master’s at Johns Hopkins University, and for one of my digital public relations courses, I had to write about our weekly readings in a blog.

One week, I wrote that search is the new advertising. The ten-cent summary is that, until recently, companies would to build awareness through advertising; today, people often become aware of companies by discovering them through search. Because of this, being able to be found in search engines is essential.

So I find it interesting what people are searching for that makes them find me. Some of the top recent searches include:

• D-Ring
• D-Ring Blog
• Steve Field
• Social bookmarking tutorial
• Turd
• “Lucas Dressel” blog
• Chris Eder
• Army public affairs
• Cyber sex jokes
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Temperature in Iraq

Interesting list. Some of them make sense. Some I can kinda see.

But come on. Turd? Who knew?

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I recently stumbled across this cool tool. It was created by a PhD student named Phil Lawson who is working on his thesis (which has to do with milblogging) and allows you to do a customized search of various top-rated milblogs on milblogging.com, as well as all of the winners of the 2006 Milbloggies. And the D-Ring for some reason.

Customized search is a great thing, and this tool seems like a great way to get the pulse of the military blogosphere in a single click. The next step is to create an even more comprehensive search that indexes all of the blogs on milblogging.com

Thanks to Phil for sharing this with all of us.

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… is that things that have long vanished from the front page of a blog continued to be discovered (thanks to the like of Google Blog Search, Technorati and the like.)

One of the top search terms for my blog?

Cambell-Ewald.

Because I slammed their YouTube video outreach efforts.

To their credit, Campbell-Ewald has done a good job of search engine optimization. (I am in the top 10 of Google, but for a more flattering follow-up I wrote.)

In a searchable online world, your reputation is harder and harder to protect. Search may forgive.

But it never forgets.

Update: An interesting addendum to my point about search from Alice at Presto Vivace.

Update: Lots of visitors from Campbell-Ewald today… any of you care to share? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

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