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CEOs Sort Of Discover Ego Surfing
from the then-again...-maybe-not dept
Do CEOs of major companies sit down at their computer, call up Google and do a little ego surfing? Of course they do... but they mostly seem unwilling to tell USA Today about it (probably because they decided to call it the especially corny "CEgO surfing"), meaning that USA Today had to do it for them. Basically, they went around and looked up the names of various CEOs to see what they would see, if they did do the searches themselves. There is, of course, a mixture of good and bad -- but the article recommends that CEOs spend a bit of time every once in a while to check out what their names reveal. The article notes that Ford's CEO refuses to ego surf, claiming it's "too depressing," which makes you wonder how he would know that... unless he ego surfed.
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Good to Great
The book "Good to Great" claims a statistical inverse correlation between companies that consistently out-perform the stock market and press references to the company's CEO. In other words, great companies tend to have CEOs that don't appear much in the press. So presumably CEgO surfing CEOs would hope to find limited Google references to themselves if they think they're running a great company.
The book adopts a mathematical definition for a "great" company (i.e., consistently out-performing the stock market for an extended period of time) and performs statistical analyses to determine what makes a company great -- interesting to see mathematics applied in this way.
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No Subject Given
Who doesn't ego-surf? If you're in a line of work that puts you in the public eye, why wouldn't you want to know what's being said about you out there? Tapping the public's pulse, getting a feel for the conventional wisdom, is a great way to (A) figure out your place in the world, (B) improve on things you may not be doing right, and (C) continue to do the things you are.
I write for one of the country's biggest newspapers. I Google my name at least three or four times a week to see what's being said about my work and about me. It's a handy way to know what resonates well with readers, what doesn't resonate so well, and what people think of me (and my writing).
For me, ego-surfing has been one of the Internet's biggest blessings.
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