What’s your networth?

Purely aside from the fact that I love this concept, the question raised is increasingly important, and increasingly broad.

It used to be that you were the sum of what the people in your sphere of experience knew of you. And while that hasn’t essentially changed, the sphere has expanded, and now what people know of you isn’t just what they see when they see you, what they hear from you and about you, and what they know from those who know you. Now you’re everywhere, digitally.

Google yourself. What comes up? Is it right, wrong, not enough, too much? We worry a lot these days about being too electronically visible, but chances are that in some respects, you’re not visible enough. You’ve probably done more things, and more important things, than any of us know.

Seth’s Godin’s blog today makes an interesting observation: maybe resumes are old school, passe, irrelevant, last generation’s way of painting the hire-me self-portrait. His point: extraordinary people don’t have just a resume. Google them, and you find multiple points of electronic engagement with them: blogs, personal web sites, papers, photo streams — many electronic facets of who they are.

How about you? What’s out there? And is it what you want, what shows that you are extraordinary? If it’s just your Facebook page, it ain’t enough.

I won’t argue that resumes and CVs aren’t important, but as Seth says in his post, they are more reasons to reject you (the right keywords didn’t come up in our ResumeDigger software) than they are reasons to be wowed by you.

To borrow from Tom Peters, the WOW factor is huge, not just for your projects, but for your Self (in both the existential sense and the hire-me sense).

Make sure that your WOW is findable.