It’s been a few weeks since I posted here and for good reason. But this really isn’t the time or place to talk about it. (If you’re my Facebook friend and you know me personally, you already know why I haven’t posted.)

I’ve written here before about the need to post frequently and maintain a  constant presence. Consistently creating high-quality content is the best way to build influence in the social media sphere and to increase the chances that  posts be featured high in search results.

What if you’re not up to creating high-quality content? Jim Rome the popular sports DJ jokes that he has to go “down in the basement and recharge the batteries” every now and then to keep the quality of his program up to  his standards. This is a human and normal thing to do – yet professionals still feel the need to tweet their vacations away. Stop it.

If you’re in a corporate environment you need a plan for your personal time. For the agency blog, we keep a couple generic articles in reserve that can be posted when people are on vacation – we advise clients to do the same. If you’re a personal blogger you can do something similar, posting before your vacation but not have the posts go live  till you’re far away from responsibility – WordPress makes this really easy. Or you can just give yourself a break. I did and I don’t feel guilty.

Yesterday Google launched Google Buzz with a “so what” that rang much clearer but with less of a let down than last weeks iPad introduction. It’s not fully activated so I haven’t used it on my desktop Gmail yet (yes, I activated it) but it is working on my iPhone. It looks interesting but I’m not really excited about it yet because it won’t be all that useful until lots of people adopt it like they have Facebook and Twitter. And as long as it’s tied to a Gmail account, I don’t see that happening quickly. For example Hotmail has a much larger user base than Gmail. And what about all the Yahoo, AOL, AT&T, Comcast, and private domain email addresses that people aren’t going to want to abandon to have their email account attached to Google Buzz? But maybe that’s Google’s strategy — to get people off competitors products.

Google is one of the most important players, if not the most important player on the internet today. It controls what we see on the internet when we search. And they can effect what we don’t see. But today on the internet,  Facebook is the closest thing to a social hub. So far from Google we have Google Connect, Wave, YouTube, Okurt, Picasa, Sidewiki and now Google Buzz — none of these are anything close to a hub for most internet users.

For us who blog, we already know that the two top ways to organically drive traffic is SEO and with social tools. As social continues to grow SEO and SEM (Google’s main business) will become less and less dominant. This means Googles dominance of the Internet will wain to an extent if they don’t gain more control of how we interact socially on the Web. Couple that with Microsoft’s aggressive tactics with Bing, and they have a real interest in investing heavily social tools.

What does that mean? It means I’m excited to see what Google comes up with and how these tools evolve over time. But I’m not seeing this as any huge game changer.

This train wreck that’s been happening on all the gossip sites, new channels, and sports outlets should be driving two things home to everyone who lives in the digital age. There is no privacy and can’t control your personal brand.

So what if you’re not Tiger Woods with millions of dollars of endorsements to worry about? You have a potential employer, neighbor, girlfriend, or relative that will Google you and what comes up should be good. Also there several search engines created just to pull up all the good and bad about you.

So what’s a person living in the digital age to do? Fortunately, you can use some of the same strategies we advise companies to use every day that will help you give your personal brand the guiding influence it needs.

Monitor everything. It’s easy to set up a Google Alert on your name right now.

Create your own content instead of leaving it all up to others. That means:

• Start a professional blog. It isn’t as hard a you might think.
• Create account profiles even if you don’t use them often on Yahoo and Google and anywhere else you can think of that will reflect well on you.
• Tweet. It’s even easier than blogging.
• Create a profile on Linkedin. Everybody’s doing it and they search pretty well.
• Get active on social networks and tweak your privacy settings so what you want people to see is visible and what you don’t isn’t. I have mine set on Facebook so that anyone can find me but only friends can see personal information and updates, and so that search engines will not index my information. Most importantly, I set my photo settings so only I can see photos tagged of me (hey, I went to college before the digital camera revolution.) For all other networks, I limit my conversation to what would be appropriate discussion with clients and colleagues. For me, that’s probably broader than others.

Don’t discuss politics or religion online unless it’s your profession – meaning a political columnist or a minister. Why give someone a reason not to like you before they get to know you?

Attempt to correct any misinformation out there or at least ask to add your side of the story.

Stay up to date. If you got married, it be a good idea to remove that profile on a dating site, lest you looking like a cheater.

Oh, and don’t forget to be good. It’s hard to keep a secret these days, so you might as well not take any chances.

My first experience with BackNoise ever was three weeks ago at the New Media Atlanta conference. BackNoise is a website that allows people watching an event to provide a running commentary of what is happening. They can do it anonymously or, if they choose, comment using their name.

What this provided was a window into what people hated and occasionally liked about what was happening on the stage. Some of it was the kind of commentary, in polite company, people keep to themselves. This provided a wake up call for the event organizers on how little patience the audience had for promotional blather. It also informed some of the speakers on how they should do their presentations after the previous presenter got low marks on their PowerPoint. It also informed how nasty some people can get with what normally would be their would be internal dialog.

Jeff Turner mentioned the conversation and even let it influence his presentation. Later, Chris Brogan took the demon by the horns and put BackNoise up in place of his PowerPoint. I think this actually worked in his favor. He definitely had one of the best presentations of the day, many would say the best.

Other folks have done a more extensive job about dissecting what happened and another has written about how speakers should react. So let’s talk about what it means as marketers.

Imagine your corporate website was subject to this kind of brutality. Well it is now thanks to Google Side Wiki.

Or folks were trashing your commercials while watching a program. Thanks to Twitter, they are.

Now people are commenting during meals at your restaurant and posting while staying in your hotel. Frankly, the marketer, the speaker, the business and the actor have all lost control of the conversation. But if, like Brogan, and embrace the conversation, you can make it work for you. Because, what choice do you really have?