I really did create Secret Sig. And it pretty much unfolded the way that I described in my How I Created Secret Sig post (less all the snarkiness). And after I made Secret Sig I pretty much put it on the shelf. But like the ring of power Secret Sig did indeed have a will of its own. And like the ring of power it was forgotten for a long time. Until it awoke and ensnared me. This is the story about how Sig Mosley found out that I created Secret Sig.
Once again, it all started innocently enough. It was June of 2008. I had a meeting with Melanie Leeth of Imlay Investments. I wanted to get her view on one of the companies that I advise. And as is often the case when seeking Melanie's advice we were having a great conversation. Right in the middle of it she changed the subject. Melanie asked me "Lance, what are your going to do?" Well since she asked me, I told her. I told her my master plan. She wanted to know if I had discussed this with Sig. I told her no and she encouraged me to do so. So shortly thereafter I sent Sig a note and we scheduled lunch at the now defunct The Globe in Technology Square.
Sig Mosley and I went to lunch. We had a good meeting. As we were winding things down and settling our tab Sig asked me one last short question.
"Have you ever heard of Twitter?"
"Yes" I replied as calmly as possible while a B9 voice started screaming in my head.
"Well somebody has gone and created a Twitter account called Secret Sig and attached a Web page to it. Would you have any idea about how someone could do such a thing?" Sig asked. I am not sure of the exact words. I was in a state of shock. And panic.
Yes, Secret Sig did indeed have a will of its own. And lots of power. The power of Web crawlers. The power of search engines. All you have to do is bing Sig Mosley to understand the extent of the power. Someone close to Sig had searched on the term Sig Mosely and told him about Secret Sig.
Here I was sitting across from the most powerful technology investor in Atlanta, if not the Southeast, and he was asking me a direct question about something that I had created to semi-impersonate him. I never dreamed that things would unfold this way. People talking about it at an event and online with me just listening, sure. Getting asked a direct question from Sig himself, no. My mind was racing. Really, really racing. I had not done anything with the Secret Sig persona for several months. Was this an innocent question? Was there some artifact out on the Web that connected me to Secret Sig from the botched first attempt? Does he know? What do I say? Is my master plan going to completely blow up before it gets out of the gate? My career flashed before my eyes. I tried to stay as visibly calm as possible.
You know they say under stress people revert to their true self. I believe in being honest. It's what my parents taught me. So I came clean. I told Sig the truth. It was really the only option. "Yes Sig, I know how someone could do such a thing. I created Secret Sig."
And waited for a response. Waited for what seemed an eternity. How was the unwitting father of Atlanta angel investing going to respond to this gem of a confession? I really did not know him very well. We had worked together on the GRA/TAG business launch competition but that was about it. I had no idea how he was going to react. I was dying.
And what did Sig do? Sig smiled. To me at the moment a smile that was more beautiful than the Mona Lisa. With that smile I knew things were going to be all right.
Sig asked me how I did it. I told him the story. He asked me about Twitter. I told him all about that as well. Sig asked me if he could have control of @secretsig. I said yes. I even game him a tutorial on how to use it. With the exception of an entry or two at the beginning it has been Sig himself tweeting since last June.
Eventually Sig asked me if he could have control of Secret Sig he wanted to change some of the content. Correct some errors in fact. I said yes. Came to find that there is really no way to transfer a blogger account. So I am now the webmaster of the only Web presence of Sig Mosley and Imlay Investments. Sig wants changes, I get cracking.
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.
One of the mainstay features on FoG over the past two years has been the "quote of the week". It is a post that appears every Friday at noon (I tried 3:14 for a period, but noon works better). It started as a throwaway, something to get a quick and easy article up at the end of the week. Quotes are easy to find if you are looking for them.
It has evolved into a pretty popular series. One of the quote of the week posts generated more comments than any other article in the history of FoG. Heck I even used the quotes to create a presentation called "Startups in 12 Quotes" that generated over 2,700 views, 18 favs, and 9 embeds on slideshare.
But with the break from FoG I have also been thinking if I wanted to continue with the quote of the week feature. But instead of deciding by myself in some misguided self-absorbed vacuum, I thought I would ask the audience via a poll.
Please take a moment to take the poll. And comments beyond the poll are of course welcome.
I got up this morning for an early breakfast meeting. Made it out of the house in about 30 minutes. No kids to feed and get ready for school. They were still sleeping comfortably. A real sign it's summer. And if it's summer then spring break must be over and it's time to start paying attention to FoG again.
It's been over five weeks since I have written a blog post. I stopped because I needed a break. And when I stopped I did not know for certain if I would start up again. So instead of writing articles I spent time thinking. Thinking if I wanted to write articles.
Part of me said no, that I had achieved the objectives that I set when I started blogging. As I wrote in my second blog post:
"I am blogging to find my voice again,
learn about this new corner of the Internet, see how it might work for
my clients, and shameless self-promotion."
FoG has been a pretty good vehicle for me to be me. That individual that some how was turned into a corporate drone (never really). I have learned quite a bit about social media. Dare I say an expert? (shudder). Perhaps. And somewhere along the way I lost my clients as I focused more and more on finding my own startup. As for the shameless self-promotion, that never ends, marketing is a never-ending process. So a part of me feels that I have achieved almost all I can achieve with my personal blog. At this point is keeping it up worth the effort? Would the time I spend on FoG be best put to use on more important objectives? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Something else happened as well. It seems I had stopped writing because I had something to say and started writing to build traffic. To keep the Compete, Google Analytics, Technorati gods happy. To keep those trend lines hockey sticking upward. Two words. Off strategy.
So I stopped. To get a little perspective. Just to let it go. And I gotta tell you, I did not miss the writing all that much. But there was one thing I did miss. I missed all of you that make FoG a community. As a community where good conversation can happen. As a community where I try to be a good approachable organizer and meet interesting new people with interesting points of view.
So I am back on FoG. And I am going to keep on it for a while.
On March 2 I announced the Build My Timbuk2 Bag contest and promised to announce the winner by midnight. Twenty four people joined in the fun and one person was even inspired to go get a Bag In A Box Gift Card for their wife's birthday. Thanks to everyone that participated and special thanks to Erika Brookes and SJ for helping me judge the entries. There were some tough calls.
Andy Macdonald, a 23 year old Graphic Communications student at Clemson University, earned honorable mention with his subtle semi-monochromatic design. It matches my car nicely, and if this was going to be my use all the time bag it would have won. But I have a standard issue Tumi that I use when things get serious, so while a valiant effort Andy did not take home the grand prize.
Ajai Karthikeyan, a second year College of Computing student at Georgia Tech, went bold with a design that mixed the FoG color palette with a tribute to my MindSpring heritage. Very nicely done. Another worthy mention.
Ultimately the judges landed on Clark Griffiths' design as the winner. Clark is an urban designer/planner and aspiring professional photographer out of Tampa Bay. The bag's blue/white/spinach scheme is both bold and fresh. It builds upon the equity that I have built in my FoG color palette. It is just smoking hot. A great bag for when I am hanging with the up and coming Atlanta startup crowd.
Congratulations to Clark for the winning design! And thanks again for everyone that played and helped out.
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.
On Friday Patrick Clements tweeted out that I had linked to a presentation about personal marketing. He could not find it. Either could I. Made a comment to me that it was something edgy. The only thing I could think of was Marta Kagan's social media marketing deck.
But my Startups in 12 Quotes deck attracted a follower that had faved "how we all become ELVIS, a note on personal brands."
Team Skribit gave me a Timbuk2 Bag In A Box gift card for the work I have been doing with them. And what I am going to do with it is build my own bag. I have selected the medium laptop messenger as my bag of choice. Now I need to design it.
Issue is I am not much of a designer. I can provide design direction. I can even tweak design. But I am not much good at design itself. So I am going to have a little contest and have you design my bag for me. Winner gets the choice of a $20 iTunes or Amazon gift certificate. Spend 15 minutes. About $80 an hour. Seems fair.
Go to the next step and select the color of the logo.
Make a comment on this post indicating your design by midnight on Sunday March 8.
Use the following form in your comment: left panel color/center panel color/right panel color/logo color. For example Navy/Rocky Road/Army/Olive. (Timbuk2 really needs a save/share function).
Winning bag design will be selected and announced on FoG by midnight on March 11.
The winner of the contest will be decided by Erika Brookes who has been described as an expert on being both technically smart and chic, SJ who has a bit of a bag fetish, and me.
I don't have to actually use the winning design.
If I don't use the winning design the winner still gets the $20.
It all started innocently enough when I read this tweet.
What's that all about I wondered? Well it turns out that a pack of Web celebs created charity auctions on eBay to benefit charity: water (a worthy cause). Julia Roy was offering a 6 hour dinner and drinks outing. Being a semi experienced Ebayer, I decided to have a little fun.
It seemed to work.
Emboldened, I went too far.
Too far, as in putting in a bid for $1,200. It was a too much for d***e. He dropped out at $1,101. I was currently the winning bidder at $1,126. I sent Julia a direct message.
I am indeed happily married with a great wife and two great kids. And I was mortified, absolutely mortified, that no one was going to outbid me. Julia sent me back this nice message.
Which sounded all well and good. I have a personal slush fund that I can do whatever I want with. Abby, my wife, is an understanding lady that let's me do lots of things. But I was having a real hard time figuring out how I was going to explain spending $1,200 on a charity in conjunction with dinner and drinks with a twenty something blonde in NYC that had been referred to as "the world’s hottest geek". It would be a cold spring in Atlanta if that came to pass.
Eight days went by. No other bids. Deepening distress.
Julia and my $1,126 bid made its way to the front page of eBay.
I started scheming up some ways that I might be able to get a little value out of my donation. Julia seems smart. Understands social media. Perhaps I could use some of those six hours included in the auction as social media consulting time. If the bid stood that was my plan. See if Julia would agree to do some consulting work when I went off to do my next big thing.
I was explaining all this to Calvin Yu and Paul Stamatiou during our bi-weekly Skribit meeting . Paul got pretty excited. He knows Josh Spear who founded Undercurrent. Julia works there as a Senior Agent. He offered to go in half. I told him he did not need to do that. But I was more than a bit relieved when I saw this.
Paul went on to win the auction at the price of $1,549. He published his thoughts on winning.
My thoughts. All's well that ends well. In a roundabout way I helped raise money and awareness for charity: water. Paul is going to NYC to hang with his friend and meet a new one. Increased exposure for Skribit and him are sure to result. And I learned a lesson.
Natasha Wescoat also has an auction on eBay to benefit charity: water. I am currently winning.
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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