If you’re managing the online brand of you or your company, you’ve likely read all about reputation management and how you should create robust online profiles that provide useful information about you on social networking sites. These profiles not only let you have some control about what’s being said about your online (and can potentially rank above less-flattering pages that you don’t control), but you can generally include a link to the site you’d like to direct visitors, thus grabbing you some extra traffic.

For instance, I might include a link in my profiles back to this site so that no one searching for me misses out on my music woes and Apple hostility.

I was checking out Microsoft’s new Tafiti when I noticed a curious thing. The profile pages about me that were ranking the best weren’t at all the ones I was expecting. If you haven’t set up profiles on these sites, you might be missing an opportunity. The highest ranking profile pages for me (several in the top 10) on Tafiti are:

• Wink (your profile is created for you, but you can claim and edit it)
• Blogger (you can create a profile even if you don’t have a Blogger blog)
• Google Groups
• Spock (like with Wink, you can claim and edit your profile)
• LinkedIn
• SEOmoz

I would have expected LinkedIn to rank fairly well, but the others surprised me. But maybe all of this is just a quirk of a shiny, newfangled, objects flying in and out type search engine. So, I checked it out.

• Live has similar results.
• Google (with the what-could-be-easier personalized results off toggle) has the Blogger profile on the first page, as well as bios from Pubcon and SES. And the cre8asite forums profile isn’t ranking too badly either.
• Yahoo also has the Blogger profile on the first page, and I’m starting to think I’d better go update that. Hang on. I’ll be right back. My LinkedIn and Spock profiles are both on the second page.
• Ask has the Blogger profile as the third result — this blog doesn’t even show up on the first page. So, if I’m looking for Ask traffic, I think my very best bet is the link to this site in that profile. Of course, Ask sent me exactly two visitors in the month of August — it has the honor of being tied with AllTheWeb, so figuring out how to optimize for it isn’t exactly going to keep me up nights (no offense, Jim!).

Doing a few quick searches for other people’s names, I find high ranking Flickr profiles, various other forum profiles, and Twitters.

What are the lessons? Don’t overlook that Blogger profile! And stalk your friends to see what profiles rank for them to find out what you might be overlooking.

I would do the same, but I have more music woes to write about.