Be Careful What You Say on the WWW…

Monitoring your brands online reputation is part and parcel of the social media strategy. Chris Brogans Grow Bigger Ears blog post is a great example of how to measure such thing yourself without the aid of Social Media Monitoring paid services.

Today I Googled myself, as you do, to see how I had been indexed. I then spent the following 20 minutes laughing hilariously at what I had found.

It’s a great example of:

1) Watch what you say online

2) You never know who is listening

3) The media can say anything

Back in January 2010 the great Machu Picchu suffered torrential rain, resulting in thousands of people being stranded at the top of one of the worlds most beautiful and important archaeological sites. The story was of interest to me because I had been in Machu Picchu only a few months before on a backpacking adventure around the world. It was a standard joke that something ridiculous would happen to us in pretty much every country we visited, such as the airline losing our luggage before the wedding, breaking down in the isolated freezing Bolivian desert, getting caught in a wind storm in New Zealand..the list is endless!

Of course these are what make the stories… Anyway after reading the article I simply commented to my friends on Twitter that this is something that would have happened to us ‘Calamity Jane’s.

So you can imagine my surprise when I Googled my name and found out that, according to the Daily Mail, I was one of the 2000 stranded people at Machu Picchu!!

And here’s little old me supposedly stranded…

It did rain the throughout the whole trek and it only ceased when we reached to top.  What a beautiful photo in my not one, but two hooded tops and rain mac…I know how to backpack in style!

Sadly I wasn’t airlifted from Machu Picchu …however the story has amused me no end and even though Im not backpacking things Im still managing to get myself in mischief

Anyone out there got any funny stories?