Being "Simon McDermott"

In 2003 I commenced on a start-up journey that would bring me to the heart of how social media works. We built technology that monitored blogs and forums and later included Facebook and Twitter. It also meant I blogged myself and tweeted and wrote 'content' on a lot of sites. This had a knock-on effect. If you searched for Simon McDermott I came first in google. And I had competition!

Simon McDermott - DJ. Simon McDermott - Rally Car Driver. Simon McDermott - Founder of Homovision. Simon McDermott - Reader's Digest journalist. Simon McDermott - young GAA star.

Here's the thing, Simon is a popular name for men from 30-60. McDermott is a familiar surname in Ireland and well travelled, particularly the USA and Australia and the English version of MacDiarmada is mostly spelled, McDermott. The proliferation of "me", was spotted by Simon McDermott the Reader's Digest journalist and he wrote about 4 or 5 of us and what we were doing across the world. Another of our number started a group on Facebook, he found 20 of us on there. I said 'hello' the rest of us stayed quiet.

Now it's had its fun moments. A beautiful woman sent me a picture of her bottom, clearly aiming for the Simon McD who was an Australian entrepreneur. And, I've been invited to a wedding, to a 30th, 40th and 50th birthday, in Australia again, for the Simon who clearly has the Hotmail address where I have the Gmail one. I've also received emails for the other SMcD who lived in Brussels at the same time as me, and his daughter went to the same school as my son, of course, people thought they might be brother and sister.

All this was fine. None of them could assail my superior position on google until that is, Simon McDermott, yes you, the one that sang with your father who has Alzheimer's. Initially, I thought the 1000% uplift in my LinkedIn views was because my tireless work in entrepreneurship was being finally recognised, although unclear why this was mostly appealing to women over 30. You came, you sang, you conquered and now only one or two of the results on Google is for me. You scoundrel :)

It's hard to be me.