Unlike past years the numbers presented above are not cumulative. Doing so makes it easier to understand what is transpiring. I also added a row showing the number of posts and used this info to calculate a Don Dodge version of a conversational index.
The number of posts written on FoG has fallen. Part of this, I am sure, is that I manage multiple blogs these days. Another big part was I took a spring break from writing last year to gain a little perspective. When I cranked things back up in the summer I had made the conscious decision that I was not going to write to build traffic, I was going to write to build community as well as devote more of my free time to other endeavors.
Traffic continues to grow, albeit at a decreasing rate. More important to me is the fact that the conversational index is a healthy and a good indicator of the community here.
The Technorati rank also has taken quite a jump, driven by the number of inbound links currently pointing to FoG. I also ran FoG through Blog Grader and it emerged with a grade of 95.8 and a rank of 10,442 which put FoG in the 94% percentile.
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."
Yesterday I spent one of the most exciting 30 minutes of my week talking with Lila King and Karyn Lu of Echo. Echo is an art and civic journalism project that will produce and collect stories tied to physical locations throughout Atlanta.
Karyn and Lila believe everyone has a fascinating story to tell. The interview below gives a little peek into the Echo story.
Karyn and Lila won $10,000 in seed money from the New Media Women Entrepreneurs. During the day Lila leads the online team behind CNN's iReport.com where Karyn is the user experience lead. It's great to see this kind of big thinking emerge from the people behind the scenes at the established media companies in Atlanta.
Force of Good turned three 10 days ago. Unlike previous years the day came and went without notice. FoG continues to grow, and grow at an accelerating rate. Here are some stats for the past three years. Visitors and comments are cumulative.
Traffic is up 325%. Visitors in 2009 have already surpassed the number for the entire year of 2008. The current run rate indicates about 90,000 visitors this year.
Comments are up more then traffic. And while I have no hard evidence to prove this, it is my firm belief that comments are a prime driver of traffic growth and not the other way around. My writing has pretty much stayed the same since I started FoG. The community has grown and is feeding off itself. The community and the content that it is creating is improving both the quality of the conversation and the intensity of the discussion. It's a good thing. A beautiful thing.
The purpose of sharing this information is not a chest pounding exercise. It's to share a real world example of something you hear experts say all the time. It takes time to build a blog. FoG is a living example of that premise. If you keep at it long enough all of a sudden your blog tips. I think that point is when the number of comments exceeds the number of posts. It took just over two years for that to happen here. And once that happens it really is no longer my blog. It belongs to the folks that read and the folks that comment. I just try to get things started by providing interesting pieces to get the conversation moving.
My purpose for creating FoG was to find my voice again, learn about social media, see how it works, and a bit of shameless
self-promotion. I have achieved these objectives. I have also accomplished something that I really did not set out to do.
A few years ago I was introduced to Kirsten Dixson. Kirsten is a personal branding guru and coauthor of Career Distinction: Stand Out by
Building Your Brand. We hit it off and she encouraged me to go through a personal branding exercise. Part of this exercise included 360 degree feedback where people that you have worked with in the past essentially describe the brand attributes of you. The single word that people used most to describe me? Intelligent. There is a problem with intelligent. It's like cool. If you say you are cool, you're not. If you going around saying you are intelligent it's worse. And what I think FoG has enabled me to do is demonstrate to a part of the world that interests me that I am smart capable person without actually having come out and say it. Until now. The point being a blog enables you to establish what you are and what you stand for to an ever growing audience.
The other brand attributes? Enterprising, passionate, visionary, and unique. Unique really was quirky, but who wants to be known as that?
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.
WebChallenge is a high-school level contest, where students are asked to use
free technologies and/or Open Source Software in order to improve their
community in some way.
For the Webchallenge 2009 contest, there are 4 main categories in which students can compete:
If you happen to know any Georgia high school students let them know about the program. If you actually happen to be a Georgia high school student, get a faculty/teacher sponsor to support your effort (not
necessarily technically, just for communication and organization), get a team. register, and get to it.
This morning I sat down to catch up with Robert Sanders. Robert knows a thing or two about building scalable Internet companies. He was the architect that created the infrastructure and systems for MindSpring, cBeyond, EarthLink Wireless, and Vitrue. During the course of our conversation he mentioned in passing that he really didn't think that many people had a solid understanding of building scalable Web apps. Robert made a comment along the lines that developers today just think they can use Amazon to solve all scale issues. Beyond the fact that there is more to scale then just more processing power and storage, this is a bad plan.
And I admire Larry's courage and transparancy for discussing Ma.gnolia's major data loss. Discussing what he intends to change as he recovers. But to build your Web service out with Mac minis and using Firewire as your backup system just doesn't seem that well thought out. You should listen to the show.
Forgive the indulgence of the Follower Tag Cloud post. The output of Twittersheep was just to artistic to muddy with mere words.
I found Twittersheep via my friend Tessa. Twittersheep is a Twitter visualization tool. It searches your list of Twitter followers and pulls together a tag cloud based on keywords in their profiles.
The big words in my followers tag cloud? Social media marketing
entrepreneur. It's kinda what I am. What I do. And what the people that follow
me do it seems.
Just read over on Feld Thoughts about the AWS Startup Challenge. If you are building a web app utilizing Amazon Web Services you should check this out. The grand prize includes $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS service credits, and a potential investment offer from Amazon. The application is short and straightforward. Deadline for entry is October 3.
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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