Last week, Nicholas Patten turned me on to Personas, a component of MIT’s Social Media Group’s Metropath(ologies) exhibit which enables users to visual their online identities.   According to the site, Personas “uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data picture of one’s aggregated online identity.”

It’s a brilliant way to look at how the Internet — or anyone who is going to google you — sees you.  The site is simple — you enter in your name and Personas scours the web for every instance of your name and attempts to characterize you.

Try it.  And enter your name a few different ways; I found that it seems to be both case and nomenclature sensitive.

But is this really me?

Many people commented on Nick’s post that Personas was fun but flawed: it didn’t represent their “real” identity — or that it captured other individuals who happened to share similar names — definitely a downside to having a common name — and lumped them together.

I, too, initially had that same reaction.  But, the reality is, this is how the internet sees us — and how it projects us to would be employers, clients, headhunters, friends, etc.  It grabs snippets of us; it confuses us with people of similar names; it doesn’t capture our entire life; in short, it’s imperfect.

This is the battle that brand marketers fight all the time.  How does the world perceive them — and is this the way they want to be perceived?  And, like brand marketers, if you don’t like how the internet represents you, you can change it by creating your own digital content to change the perception. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

Get Your Name: There are plenty services that make it easy to “own” your name digitally.  I use Network Solutions but there are other options like GoDaddy and even WordPress.  I have purchased my name in both long and short forms.  If you have a common name, consider how you might “own” the name.  For instance, Anne Bertelsen is a fairly common Scandinavian name.  Anne Mai Bertelsen or just AnneMai, on the other hand, is less common.  I own the domains to all three.

Start a blog.  Using your name, create a blog.  While this blog happens to be written — and hosted — on WordPress, I have a personal blog on Posterous which is dead simple to use.  No CSS or html to learn.  Just email your content or post via web, mobile or bookmarking.

Contribute:  Depending on what you want your brand to stand for, find places to add your thoughts, insights, comments on their blogs.  Write comments on other people’s blogs.

Be Visible:  Join and participate in social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In) and interest-relevant associations.  When you join those networks and associations, use a single, consistent, unique name — if you can — to separate yourself from others.  As I noted above, I tend to use my full name (first, middle, last) or my first and middle name vs. just my first and last name, which is more common.  In case you didn’t know, Facebook allows you to “own” your name for your Facebook vanity URL.

Be consistent: As you join these networks, use the same name and photo.  It will help in aggregating search results about you as well as helping others get to know you online.

Protect and Defend Your Reputation:  Finally, if you did something stupid online or just want a better way of tracking your online reputation, check out ReputationDefender.com.  It will search out and destroy damaging and/or inaccurate information about you online.

Hope these suggestions serve as an inspiration to manage and define your personal brand.  What suggestions or tips do you have?