Remember Nina. That lady I thought was a god send. She's a liar too.
My wireless modem never showed up on Friday.
Gotta give AT&T a little credit though. Mike showed up. I speed tested the AT&T service on Friday morning. Maxed out at 3Mbps. I signed up for 6Mbps. So I had to call technical support (my fifth AT&T call in this ordeal). It was about 7:30 am. They made me run an AT&T speed test. Like the SpeakEasy speed test was wrong.
Told me they were going to send out a tech. Gave me a window of 8 - 12. Gave them my cell. I'm going to work. Mike shows up at around 9:10 am. Abby is still home. Checks the outside equipment. Says he has to get some stuff. Goes away.
I go away. Have a fun weekend.
Come home Sunday night. Speed check. 6.2Mbps down, 435Mbps up. $32.95 a month. Rock on.
Abby checks voice mail. Mike called over the weekend. Upgraded the service. Left his cell phone number in the event we had any issues.
But remember, my wireless modem never showed up on Friday. So I called customer service (call #6) on Monday, cause AT&T's convenient for them customer service hours are 8 to 7 on weekdays. There was no record of an order. Lady places another order for the wireless modem. Tells me it will be here by Tuesday.
Tuesday comes and goes. No wireless modem. I am really not surprised. The rep that promised me that it would be
here was not able to provide me with a tracking number. Was
not able to send me a tracking number when I asked if she would do so
via email when it was available. Automated package tracking notification seems a
bit beyond AT&T's capabilities thus far in the 21st century.
So I called customer service (call #7) on Wednesday morning, cause AT&T's convenient
for them customer service hours are 8 to 7 on weekdays. Guy tells me he needs to transfer me to another queue. Puts me on hold for a bit. Comes back asks me to wait. Puts me on hold for a bit. Comes back and tells me to call back later. They are too busy. Gives me a specific number to call and tells me to call back later. When I tell him the number he gave me is the same number I called. He is dumbfounded. Tells me to call the number and select option #4.
I wait a few hours. I called customer service (call #8). There is no option #4. It is all voice activated. Get Ray. Nice lady. She can actually provide a tracking number. Wireless modem to be delivered today. The anticipation is killing me.
Got home tonight. Package is here. The anticipation is really killing me. Open the box. Wrong modem. It is the same silly single computer modem they sent when they slammed me, I'm sorry, activated my service without request.
I could not make this stuff up if I had to. But I might start a business selling unused AT&T modems on eBay.
Before I do that, I am gonna give Mike a call on his cell phone tomorrow. That will be call number 9. And this whole thing is starting to sound a little bit like that Beatles song.
I called AT&T to inquire about Internet service pricing last week. They slammed me. I figured this out last night when I got home and there was a package on the porch. Took it inside. Opened it. Saw a DSL modem. Livid.
This started 10 days ago. I made an inquiry to AT&T sales. Wanted to know how much it would cost me to bundle my Internet, phone, and television service. It was getting close to time to switch from EarthLink. Though you will not find it anywhere on their Web site EarthLink charges $49.95 for 3.0 Mpbs. AT&T is $30. I am loyal to EarthLink. But they are charging about 66% over market rate for the same level of service. It was time to switch and it was my intent to do so when Abby and the kids were off on their summer tour. Anyhow, the AT&T rep told me their pricing for various services and that I could immediately save $10 a month by switching phone service to something called Complete Choice Enhanced. I said sure and forgot about it.
On Monday night my Internet service went down. Seemed odd. Used to do that quite a lot back in the day. Not so much anymore. Decided to head off to work and give it a little time. When I got home it was still down. So I called EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well. Made me do all the obvious things. Then something not so obvious. He asked me to switch phone jacks. Which is not the easiest thing to do in the world. I pinged. Googled the word idiot. It seemed to have worked. Odd that the jack would just go bad. But I started moving some network gear around to get all the computers online. Did not work. I checked all the jacks. None of them would give me PPPoE. Called back EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well. I was told there was a widespread outage and my service would be down until midnight on Tuesday. Suggested I use dial up. Was a bit taken aback when I said that my computers did not have dial modems so that was not possible.
On Wednesday morning DSL was still down. So instead of calling EarthLink tech support, because the reps tend to not speak English well, I decided to have a chat session. Was told that the outage would continue to affect me for another 24 hours. And then I got home and opened the DSL modem. No prior notification that I had an account with them of any kind. No mail. Nothing. Just a DSL modem on my doorstep. And it's just a simple plug in one computer type of modem. Would not even work for my setup if I wanted it to.
Livid. So livid I think I scared my kids. Livid because AT&T slammed me and made my Internet service go down. To get semi-technical here, a DSL line can only be provisioned by one telephone company at a central office. If AT&T has a DSL line provisioned on the switch for your phone then EarthLink cannot. EarthLink had my line provisioned. AT&T put in the order to provision my line and essentially took down my DSL service.
Called AT&T. Asked for a sup. No love. Could not even tell me what level of service they signed me up for without my permission. Said I had to speak with customer service. Which of course is closed at night when normal people take care of such things (remember that convenient for us not the customer sin?). Denied that they had anything to do with my EarthLink service going down. Liar.
Called EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well. With a little direction he figured out my line was "inactive". Transferred me to another phone queue. The queue that I was transferred to had a recording. "Not able to handle calls due to system outages." Great.
So I called AT&T customer service this morning. Explained what had happened. Guy was a jerk. Denied that they had anything to do with my EarthLink service going down. Liar. Hung up on him.
Called back, got a nice calm lady. Explained what happened. Found out I was signed up for 6.0Mpbs service. That I was currently being billed for the DSL service, and I was being billed $75 for the DSL modem that I did not order. Made a note in the account that I did not order the service and if I cancelled I would not be billed anything.
I cranked up EarthLink chat tech support. This is the conversation.
Shawn P: Your DSL line is turned off. lance@mindspring.com: why? Shawn P: You can contact our Installation Department and get it turned back. Shawn P: Seems your area is undergoing some changes on the phone line. Hence it happened. Shawn P: You can reach us at 1-888-EARTHLINK (1-888-327-8454), available Mon - Fri 7 a.m. to Midnight, ET Sat & Sun 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET. Shawn P: This is what I am going to do for you. Shawn P: I've kept a note on your account. Shawn P: Please phone them after few hours. Shawn P: It helps us to serve you quickly.
Quickly would be nice. It's been three days. I called the EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well. He told me it would take five days to reprovision the account. I said no thanks. Tired to cancel. Guy would not let me. I hung up.
I called EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well. Told the lady I wanted to cancel. Told her pricing was too high. And I swear it was just like the infamous AOL recording.
I very specifically had to say "cancel the account" seven times. Once she got finished with that she started to tell me about the final bill that I was going to be receiving. $49.95 for the period of June 16 - July 16. I tried to politely explain to her that she could not charge me for a service that was not being provided and that if she did so I was not going to pay it. She agreed to only charge me $25 because the phone company got the other half. Told her that was not my problem and that if they charged me anything I would not pay it and would walk down the street to EarthLink HQ and have a chat with the receptionist. I am not going to get billed.
So back to AT&T to see if they want my business. Explained to the rep what happened. Said if they did not do something to make up for this mess I would cancel all my AT&T business and go to Comcast. I got transferred to a specialist. Nina.
Nina from Atlanta. Nina in Atlanta. Nina in the office park where I take the kids to Taco Mac. Nina was nice. The first person I spoke to in this whole ordeal that was nice. Nina understood the semi-technical issue I described. Nina had empathy that I had been without Internet service since Monday. Nina cut me a deal. Nina is overnighting the proper modem. Nina fixed the problem. Nina kept me as a customer.
Nina was service. Service gets and keeps customers.
Like the Secret Sig blog itself this article is written in a manner that attempts to imitate the skewering parody voice Dan Lyons created for Fake Steve Jobs. I have the utmost respect for all the individuals and organizations mentioned below. It is my hope that they all view their inclusion as a sign of great respect in the same manner that Sig views Secret Sig. With the exception of the dudes from Despair. They really are weenies.
It all started innocently enough. In January or February of 2008. Maybe March. I was a little bored. Had a little time on my hands. And I was inspired.
Inspired by the then anonymous Fake Steve Jobs. Before he become Real Dan. Fake Steve was brilliant. Literally. Perhaps the best non-marketing marketing campaign in the history of man. Or at least for a book about a technology icon.
And Fake Steve was big. Maybe even bigger then real Steve. I wanted one of my own.
The target was easy to pick if you were sitting at the epicenter of the Atlanta technology community. Sig. Sig Mosley. Sig Mosley the unwitting godfather of Atlanta angel investing. Sig Mosley without the "e" of Noro-Moseley (lots of people make that mistake). Sig had no Web site. His company, Imlay Investments, had no Web site. So I decided to make one.
I started by privately registering a few domain names. Sigmosley.com was available. I grabbed it. Thought about it a bit. Started to feel a little creepy. Almost stalker like. Ditched that. Registered secretsig.com. Felt more like fun. Fun was the goal.
I don't really code. It's not that it's hard. It's just typing. I don't have time to code. I needed some help. And help I found with my trusty confidant Blake Perdue. Blake has some mad web design skills (among others), and he put up with my insistence on using all things Typepad when creating PeachSeedz. Like he had a choice. He works for me. He does what I say. Like he had a choice in my evil plan. So he did it.
Blake designed and coded up the first version of the SecretSig Web site. I wrote the content. It was a thing of beauty. Custom templates. It even had SigWear, inspired by Andrew Hyde's VCWear. Shirts that had cool writings like "I've Been Sigged", "What Would Sig Say?", and "If You Need The Internet To Find Me You Don't Deserve Funding." This was before those weenies at StartupLounge came up with their lame Sig Said No shirt and then ceased production because the even bigger weenies at Despair (no link love for them) sent a cease and desist for the use of the :-( emoticon that some idiot at the USPTO granted a trademark (Exhibit A the trademark and patent processes are broken).
So we had the site. SecretSig was up and running. I needed a launch strategy. And if there is one thing I know how to do in the world it is launch Internet stuff. Unless it really is crappy product from some entrepreneur that has no clue. No clue that you actually need to think of your marketing strategy before you start building. That marketing is not some tag on that makes people buy bad things that they don't want or need. They are losers. I know how to tell them to get lost. Or get them to pay me a bunch of money. But I digress. I created a launch strategy. It was brilliant. Really. More brilliant then Dan Lyons. Perhaps the most brilliant simple plan in history. Even better then the Grinch.
I decided to launch via Twitter.
Twitter before everybody was getting on and being all spammy. Twitter before that jerk Tony LaRussa, whom I used to respect, decided to sue Twitter because someone was using his name and they came out with the stupid idea of non-anonymous accounts only for important people (what are they going to do, use Wikipedia to decide who is important?). Twitter before anyone in the Atlanta technology investment community was on it. But they are all on there now. And it is because of me. I was the first person to semi impersonate a member of the Atlanta technology investment community on Twitter (and as far as I know the last, nobody else has the kahonas). I set up a twitter account using the handle secretsig. Set the more info URL to www.secretsig.com. And then I had secretsig follow Sanjay Parekh.
You may have heard of Sanjay. He founded Digital Envoy, created Startup Riot, and is a founder of Shotput Ventures. Has this big hangup like Tony Dorsett about how people should pronounce his name. Gets into arguments with important people about things that don't matter. And he has doesn't have enough to do so he sits around all day long, stares at Tweetdeck and spews meaningless drivel at the rate of about a zillion messages a day. I figured follow Sanjay and it would generate about 50 tweets and somebody that was actually important like the weenies at StartupLounge would find out and spread the word. Sanjay is going to get all pissy with me for saying all this but it is true.
But Blake screwed it up. Dolt. He failed to mask the domain of www.secretsig.com about page. It looked something like forceofgood.typepad.com/secretsig_about.html. Sanjay called me on it. Sent me a DM (that's direct message for all you twittertards). I denied it. Sanjay sent me the domain evidence. Mea culpa. But Sanjay was cool. He volunteered to keep SecretSig secret.
So I took down www.secretsig.com. Then recreated it on Blogger (the application that Google paid millions of dollars to Evan Williams for and then just let it languish like every other thing they buy with the possible exception of Urchin). I did it myself and just let it sit there. Waiting for the opportune moment to tell the world. Cooking up an alternative launch strategy. But like the ring of power, Secret Sig had a will of its own...
The story about how Sig found out that I created Secret Sig is a story for another day.
This is a guest post by Russell Jurney, a technologist and serial entrepreneur. His new startup, Cloud Stenography, will launch later this year. The article is an extension of a simple question on Twitter asking the importance of Map Reduce. Some subjects take much more than 140 characters.
The Technical Situation in Brief
The advent of the personal computer and the Visicalc
spreadsheet were the foundation for a revolution in computing, business
and life whereby normal people could carry out sophisticated
accounting, analysis and forecasting to inform their decisions to
arrive at more positive outcomes. As Moore’s law
has progressed and processors have become faster, and computers
inter-networked, large volumes of highly granular data have been
collected. Analysis of terabyte datasets on the same level as a
spreadsheet has been limited by the disparity of acceleration between
processor speed and computer I/O (input/output) operations. Intel has
produced ever faster processor clock speeds without accompanying disk,
RAM or bus speeds. Put simply: We have cheap and numerous computing
resources and abundant data, but bringing those resources to bear on
that data to generate real value from it has proven exceedingly
difficult.
The widespread use of relational databases
to access data in pre-defined static relationships has also limited our
ability to discover and infer new and unique relationships among data.
Dynamic analysis of large volumes of data in relational databases
requires exhaustive pre-calculation of indexes and summaries of data
for each relationship, and scaling relational databases to handle large
datasets is a complex, painful and expensive process. As a result
business intelligence systems relying on relational databases are
prohibitively complex and expensive. Other methods of raw parallel computation, such as MPI,
were exceedingly difficult. Such ‘smart kid only’ technologies have
significant barriers of entry for mere mortals. In fact,
multi-threaded, shared-memory computation in languages like C++ are
considered some of the most difficult, arcane areas of computer
science, leading to entire languages aimed at making concurrency easier.
MapReduce As the Way Forward
In order to extract value from large piles of data, we must escape
the bounds of IO by going parallel and having many processors work on
the data at once, without grinding our development to a halt dealing
with complex algorithms and frameworks. MapReduce and platforms
that implement it satisfy this requirement for a surprisingly broad set
of problems. MapReduce is a simple way to process data in parallel
among many commodity machines. You are already familiar with the power of MapReduce in your daily use of it - it is the pattern pioneered by Google to bring you the effective search on which we now all depend.
MapReduce is the design pattern
that in combination with recent developments in cloud computing and
cheap, plentiful broadband will bring us spreadsheet-style analysis of
vast amounts of data ill suited to traditional database management
systems in both scale and structure. MapReduce offers a cost-effective
way for any business to harness massive amounts of computational power
in the cloud for short periods of time to perform complex computations
on large volumes of data that would be prohibitively expensive and time
consuming on an individual machine, or that would require the
construction of a data center to handle.
The Business Impact
What does this mean for your business? Knowledge of MapReduce has
spread beyond Google, and it is now used by an increasing number of
companies to extract value from web-scale data. Facebook, Yahoo, Cloudera and many others have embraced MapReduce in the form of Apache Hadoop, the platform around which most open discussion of MapReduce has occurred. As a result, a new generation of startups
is rising that will take advantage of MapReduce to bring the same power
that google pioneered on search to bear on a variety of datasets. New
opportunities exist by ‘thinking big’ and extracting value from
ever-increasing streams and volumes of data.
Example 1: Proving Global Warming
What does this really mean? It means that developers will have a
clear way to reduce vast datasets to scales they can work with to
extract information to inform your decisions. In this example from Cloudera, Hadoop and Pig are used to query a 138GB log of weather history for the last 100 years from the National Climatic Data Center to reduce that vast data to a scale the developer is comfortable working with. The result is this chart:
As a pile of data, the NCDC log informs nothing. When queried via map/reduce using Hadoop and Pig,
we arrive at an informative chart that shows us an important trend.
Would that chart inform a discussion about global warming? If you could
get such clear visualizations about every minutiae of your business
critical to your success, would it inform your decisions? Can you log
and mine more data to streamline your operations?
Example 2: A Supercomputer for Every Biologist
When AmazonS3, EC2 and MapReduce via Hadoop are applied to the RMAP algorithm of genetic analysis, thanks to the work of one grad student, the result is a point-click supercomputer for every biologist that wants one in the form of Cloudburst for Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.
Now any biologist that wants a supercomputer for this kind of genetic
analysis can have one by the hour, and its as easy as point-click. More
map/reduce genetic analysis algorithms are sure to follow. That's
revolutionary.
Conclusion
We are constrained in our strategies by what we imagine possible.
MapReduce and cloud computing open broad possibilities and business
opportunities by placing a usable supercomputer by the hour in the
hands of every startup that wants one. There is no problem which you
lack the processing power to solve, its just a question of whether the
hourly cost is profitable. That's a profound change from being bound to
one machine. As a result of this shift, smaller companies can attack
'bigger' problems without a large up-front investment in hardware or
software infrastructure.
A new renaissance in computing is coming that will be comparable to
the business adoption of the personal computer and VisiCalc, and
MapReduce will drive it.
FoG has made its way onto Alltop's Top Startup News (with its humorous "See also Venture Capital and Egos" sub heading). I am quite honored. It's kinda cool though I don't think I qualify as one of the cool kids. Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of
popular topics. Alltop updates the stories every hour and users pick topics by
searching, news category, or name. A few weeks ago Alltop launched their MyAlltop feature, which allows users to create a custom Alltop page that contains only the subscriptions to the websites and blogs they want.
Here's a nice little walk through.
With the new customization features I can see how the less technically inclined (the majority of folks who use the Internet BTW) might find Alltop very useful. At a higher level Alltop's apporach is part of the answer to the information overload problem. After all, info overload is merely bad design, which is exactly the issue for the way most RSS readers operate. Alltop says it is aggregation without aggravation. Perhaps.
You can find my Alltop page at my.alltop.com/lance. You might want to go grab yours.
Tonight on 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl will be reporting on computer viruses and botntets that propagate on the Internet and infect PCs, which enable their creators to do all types of evil things via remote command and control. The show airs tonight, should get some good
ratings - it's right after the NCAAs. And if information security alone is not your thing Lebron James is featured on another
segment in the show. Leslie Stahl previews her report below.
mobicamp is a new, annual
unconference in Atlanta centered around mobile technology and its
impact on the day to day life of average users. It is aimed mainly at
software developers and students, but is open to anyone with interests
in the mobile/wireless space.
Somehow or the other I convinced Amro that it might not be a bad idea to have some more business focused discussions as well and he has partnered with the Wireless Technology Forum in an effort to broaden the scope a bit.
mobicamp is based on the wildly popular unconference design of BarCamp. We've had two very successful BarCamps at ATDC the past two years and the first CloudCamp back in January. There (hopefully) will be no cost to attend, but those that do so must agree to actively participate either as speakers, active audience members, or volunteers. The premise is simple. Come together. Meet new people. Think big thoughts. Say what you are thinking. Leave energized.
You may have heard that Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo, publicly offered $250,000 for two years for one of the top twenty slots of suggested users that Twitter is now offering up as part of its service. Jason's offer was a publicity stunt. A game. He intended to attract media coverage. He is extremely skilled at getting attention. The king of linkbait. It is one of the things that makes him a good entrepreneur. And once again it worked.
Jason outlined his thought process for the $250k offer in his most recent list mailing (He stopped blogging in 2007. Blogs are so last, last year, though he really did not stop.) Jason did some math on his offer and this is what it looked like.
My plan was to post the Top Five most absolutely fascinating questions
from Mahalo Answers to our @questions account every day.
Everyone loves a timely or fascinating question and, in my estimation,
I would get a one percent clickthrough rate on each question. If I was
able to reach three million followers, and kept half of them (1.5m),
that means every tweet would get 15,000 visits. Five a day means
75,000 daily visits, and over two million visits a month--or close to
50m visits of two or three years. Some percentage of those two million
would participate in Mahalo by asking or answering questions, and if
that number is also .5 to 1%, that means I would get about 250,000 new
members for my service.
Each of those 250,000 new members would cost me one dollar, and I'm
certain over their lives we would monetize them for much more than
that.
Jason estimated his customer acquisition cost of doing a deal to buy a Twitter suggested users slot to be a dollar. Customer acquisition cost is simply the cost of securing a new customer, member, or user. And while not every startup is well funded like Mahalo and has $250k
to throw around on a whim, there is an important lesson here.
Customer acquisition cost is a key driver of any Internet business.
Especially so for early stage and growth stage companies. It deserves deep thought and consideration. While I might not buy into Jason's math and question some of the assumptions made to reach the customer acquisition cost in this instance, he walked through the logic. Every entrepreneur running an Internet business needs to be able to do the same. You can start with a very simple model. If you have no history make some reasonable well thought out assumptions. Have data points and facts to back your assumptions. Using services like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as examples and a basis for assumptions is a bad idea. Yes, Web services need to grow virally and via word of mouth (the two are not one and the same) to be successful. But at some point it is going to take more then that. Just assuming 20% quarter over quarter growth rates won't cut it. Nobody is going to buy into that assumption unless you are actually achieving 20% quarter over quarter growth rates. And then they are going to want to know how you are going to sustain it.
Customer acquisition costs is one of the three most important drivers of a SaaS business model (churn and recurring revenue being the other two), if you are going to build a successful Internet business you need to know customer acquisition marketing cold or find somebody who does. It is the only way that you can cost effectively grow your business.
AtlantTech reported today that Twitpay has raised an undisclosed round of funding.
Twitpay, the second Startup Weekend Atlanta company to secure seed captial (Skribit being the first), is a simple way to send payments via Twitter. The service is powered on the backend by Amazon Payments. Twitpay went live two weeks ago.
Somehow or the other I came to be known as a quasi-expert on personal branding. And with the unemployment rate topping 8% the pace of people coming to me and asking about personal branding has taken quite a spike in the past month of so. Surprisingly, all of the people that are doing so are currently gainfully employed (those that are not just want job leads, which is a bad strategy).
Also surprising is that they are really coming to ask me about online identity management, which is just one facet of a holistic personal branding effort. While I may save the broader personal branding discussion for a real expert or a later day, personal branding is essentially the way an individual communicates their unique promise in value in the same manner a company would. Online identity management focuses on creating a positive and distinguished Web presence of a person on the Internet.
Here are ten steps I recommend to manage your online identity.
1. Conduct An Vanity Search Audit
Have one of your friends do a vanity
search audit (Google, LIve & Yahoo!). I recently had a meeting with a young lady to discuss
managing her online brand. She was a little surprised I googled her
before our meeting. Even more surprised that I found one of her niche
social networking profiles with a reference to drinking and partying.
2. Clean Up Your Debris
If the audit uncovers anything unseemly, pick it up and discard it.
3. Control Your Social Network Audiences
Control is not a bad thing. Close down your more social social network profiles to your real friends. You don't want people that are searching for you as part of a background check to see comments from your college roommate on Facebook or MySpace. Maybe that is just me. Then again, maybe not.
4. Be You
Cleaning up your debris and making sure some potential hiring company or business partner does not have full access to all your social networks does not mean losing your personality and becoming some sterile drone (discretion is a good quality). Be nice, be helpful, demonstrate a little expertise, and above all be yourself. It is the only way that you can be consistent enough to create a brand of you.
5. Create Home Base
A place where you put all the stuff that you want people to find out about you. It can just be a collection of links to other places to find you on the Web, an online portfolio, a blog, or all of the above. You can do this on the cheap with tools such as blogger.com but you don't want a cheap personal brand and...
6. Home is Really Google
Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research believes that a company's home page is really google.com. So is your personal home page. Professionals are googling you. Before they meet you. Before they interview you. As an example the number one keyword phrase driving traffic to FoG is "Lance Weatherby". It has the second keyword phrase beat by 100%
In his article Jeremiah points to some research that indicates the top three search results are clicked on 75% of the time. You want to own those SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and if at all possible you want to dominate the entire default preference of 10 results. How can you do that?
7. Register a Personal Domain
I can not think of a single person that I know that has a personal domain that does not have the number one SERP on a vanity search. Fifty six percent of the people that search for you are going to click on that number one link. Own it and control you online identity destiny.
8. Customize Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn is purely professional and can be effectively managed as a pillar of your online identity. Personalize your LinkedIn public profile to the form http://www.linkedin.com/in/lanceweatherby. It will return better search results. Instructions for doing so as well as other methods to promote your public profile are here. To expose your profile to anyone using LinkedIn go to the Edit Public Profile Settings and select Full View. Make your profile as complete as your resume.
9. Scribd It
Great place to post your bio, resume and other portfolio materials. Make sure the files you upload are saved with your full name in the file name. I put my resume up in January. It is currently the fifth SERP on my name.
10. Use Niche Social Media
You can use niche sites to fill out your top SERPS. ClaimID (which I really like a lot), Naymz, and Rapleaf are all online identity management services that could be utilized. If you are really active and social online a number of niche sites could fill this void. Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, you name it. Just be aware if it is searchable people will search and find it.
And everything else. To create a positive online identity that highlights your achievements and skills you must actively manage your Web presence. Hopefully these steps will get you moving down that road.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
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