Does Your Name Need to Be Spelled Right?

After raving about Chuck Olsen’s Blogumentary for the past 5 months, posting about the film multiple times, interviewing him, and even giving him money, I realized I’ve been spelling his name wrong (Olsen, not Olson).

Google returns 314 results for “chuck olson blogumentary“. Five of them, including the top 2, are regrettfully, me. Oddly, the Pioneer Press got it right and wrong.

Hopefully, my 5 results will soon be added to Google’s 7,430 results for “chuck olsen blogumentary“.

Either way, this incident got me pondering the old PR adage “any press is good press as long as they spell your name right.”

Google’s a great spellchecker, always offering an non-intrusive “did you mean…” right where you need it. With enough context, Google will send us to the right place no matter how badly we butcher our request. Does this create a benefit to consciously misspelling names?

There’s benefit to purchasing slight misspellings of domain names - just so squatters, spammers, and phishers, don’t drag your good name through the muck.

By that logic, if misspellings still come back to the correct party, was I inadvertently doing Chuck a service by propagating misspellings of his name throughout the internet?

Discuss amongst yourselves

- Garlic Fan Durgen.