Tom Pham

At the beginning of the year, I was looking at other jobs. Things changed and I started to like the work I do so I'm content here. Because I was applying for Director level positions, I knew that 'Tom Pham' would be Googled.

This is not a good thing. I did a Google search on Tom Pham and found a lot of my comedy stuff. We're talking about my comedian website, links to my YouTube videos and my blog. My IT persona totally went against my stage persona, thus, T-Phizzle was born. It took half a week to do, but I had to change my website from tompham.com to tphizzle.com. I had to go edit my YouTube videos and replace 'tom pham' with 't-phizzle'. I did this for every instance of my presence on the web. Fast forward 8 months later, it looks like it worked. If you go deep enough, you can see some connections of 'tom pham' to my comic work.

A few things happened here. 1) Tom Pham (me) does not show up on the first page in a Google search as it once did. 2) My professional (Director of User Experience) profile does not show up until the 3rd page of a Google search.

Let me tell you what does show up and it is because of me. People (friends and fans) search Google and YouTube for 'Tom Pham' because they hear that I've got my videos out on the net. They see this Tom Pham kid (not me) playing Unfaithful on the piano. Most people will click on the video, view it for a little bit and forget about trying to find my videos or info on the web.

Thus, this little pencil neck punk kid is syphoning my web traffic. Now I have to spend the next 3 months doing some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work on my professional profile.

The good news? T-Phizzle is at the top of a Google search. The drawback of the good news? If someone hears my name on stage, they'll Google 'fizzle' and I'm no where to be found under that search. I wonder if Biggie would have had this problem.