Spell Your Name Wrong

Why would you? Spell your name wrong that is? Well, according to Patrick O’Malley, or is that O’Mally, this is the great missing LinkedIn tip. He suggests adding common misspellings of your name to your summary profile so that anyone searching for you and not getting it quite right might still find you.

Indeed, if you search for Patrick O’Malley he’s right there, top of the list, but if you search for Patrick O’Mally, he’s the only one. It would probably almost be worth Patrick changing his name just for the uniqueness of it as a keyword!

I don’t know if anyone searching for me ever spells my name wrong. I know for a fact that people I deal with where I say my name, usually get it just right: David B-R-A-D-L-E-Y. No one ever says B-R-A-D-L-Y without the E or with an extra L thinking I’m one of the Brady Bunch or something.

But, just in case I took Patrick’s tip to heart and added the David Bradly spelling just in case. Of course, some uninitiated Americans occasionally think I’m a Jewish comic scriptwriter called Bradley David (he’s my alter ego) and call me Brad on the phone. It’s not quite the same as saying, you can call me Al. Of course there are variations on my given name, so once I had a byline as Dave Bradley in New Scientist it was the only time an editor abbreviated me. I could be Davey Bradley, but that sounds silly or even most pretentiously Davide Braudleigh. Occasionally, I might be David Bradbury.

Another “typo” credited me in a science book I co-wrote along with Iain Stewart, Richard Dawking, and John Girbin as “David Bailey“, I presume they thought I was the famous monochrome photographer of the stars, but why Bailey would be writing about buckyballs and supramolecular chemistry I really don’t know. They were very apologetic and if there had been a second edition (Hah!) I think they would have corrected my byline.

But, as I was writing this post, it occurred to me that there is no reason to limit this little game to your LinkedIn profile, it would make sense to do the same in a footnote to your online resume, your about page, and social media and networking sites. It’s old-hat but gray-hat search engine optimization (SEO) to be honest. Misspelling keywords and stuffing pages and meta tags with them was a trick from the early days.

But, there is a subtle distinction here. If your name is fairly well-known, or you slapped palms but didn’t exchange business cards, adding the common misspellings of your name to at least one web page may help that wannabe contact of yours find you when they otherwise might have gone done a blind O’Malley.