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.
Last week I delved a bit into the concept of business clusters and made a promise to address the subject of how a stronger consumer technology cluster may emerge in Atlanta. In the post last week I spent a lot of time focusing on one of Michael Porter's key findings in cluster development, that anchor companies play a disproportionate role in seeding cluster development. This week I want to pull another key finding that is not only important to cluster development but also to entrepreneurial opportunities into the discussion.
New firm and cluster opportunities arise at the intersection of existing clusters.
This is really an important concept and leads of course to the question of what types of clusters currently exist in Atlanta. As pointed out in the Porter report financial services,transportation/logistics are strong broad clusters and the technology cluster draws its roots on telecommunications and media. Beyond that I personally believe that we have strong technology clusters in logistics, Internet security, and payment processing. Maybe Internet services as well if you include the likes of Cbeyond, Cox, EarthLink, and Knology in that mix.
But roots in telecom and media. That is interesting. Real interesting. Particularly when one starts thinking about "new" media. I kinda hate the term. Nobody really knows what it means. Even Wikipedia, a new media form in and of itself fails. Webopedia has the best definition I could find:
New Media is a generic term for the many different forms of electronic communication that are made possible through the use of computer technology. The term is in relation to old media forms, such as print newspapers and magazines, that are static representations of text and graphics.
New media includes: Web sites, streaming audio and video, chat rooms, e-mail, online communities, Web advertising, virtual reality environments, integration of digital data with the telephone, such as Internet telephony, digital cameras, and mobile computing.
In other words it includes a lot, including the fine content you can find on FoG. But it is much more than that and it just so happens that Atlanta has a pretty strong foundation in new media.
Atlanta has a strong foundation in new media? Here I go, being all crazy once again. But I typically like to back up my crazy statements with specific facts, so here goes.
According to Comscore Media Metrix (part of a long forgotten Atlanta win), three of the top 50 Web properties in the U.S. are based in Atlanta and have a combined reach of just over 50% of the Internet audience (in a given month half of the Internet user in the U.S. visit these properties). The properties are Turner at #12, Weather at #16, and Cox at #44.
Yeah folks, Turner's Web properties are the 12th largest in the country in and of themselves reaching 23% of all Internet users. This includes not only Cartoon Network but NASCAR.com, PGA.com, and PGATour.com among their smaller properties like TNT and TBS. Turner is a new media powerhouse. Larger then Facebook. By about 15%. Can you say anchor? And remember:
Anchor companies play a disproportionate role in seeding cluster development...producing numerous spin-out companies, which strengthen key elements of the cluster.
But that's not all. I wish I had full access to Comscore's numbers so that I could get a bit more granular, but I don't. Regardless, both Careerbuilder and Time Warner with CNN have significant presence in Atlanta. Significant like buildings full of people working on core new media services. In you include Careerbuilder and TW in the Internet reach numbers that I outlined above the total reach jumps to 78%. You can discard this if you want and my argument still holds. There is a strong new media cluster in Atlanta. Why no one talks about this is beyond me, but its there. I know it's there. And I am not alone. That gives me hope.
The 250 or so people packed into Turner last fall that sat and listened to 60 companies pitch their wares at the New Media Business Exchange gives me hope.
Noro Moseley Partners hiring Greg Foster to head up a new media practice gives me hope.
A very prominent new media entrepreneur/executive working behind the scenes to put together, for lack of a better term, a MediaLab (think a VentureLab that extends beyond the boundaries of Georgia Tech) focused on new media startups gives me hope.
Having 60 people come together over a weekend to create Skribit gives me hope.
The Boostphase effort, a seed stage investment company for capital efficient startups gives me hope.
Seeing two very interesting companies emerge from Turner in the past two months give me hope.
More Atlanta startups in the new media space then I can mention gives me hope.
I could go on. And I hear it in the comments already. Hope is not a strategy. And it's not.
But to paraphrase a certain senator from Illinois, that's not the type of hope I am talking about. It's much larger than that. It's the same hope that makes you want to go out and start a company. Or grow a company. It's the hope of a much larger opportunity. The hope of being part of something larger. A larger opportunity that we need to seize.
For me, it's more than hope. It's a belief. A belief that in the next ten years Atlanta can establish itself as strong in the new media space as we have in the Internet security space.
But hope and belief is not a strategy. Where does that leave us?
Let's go back to Porter's key finding, new firm and cluster opportunities arise at the intersection of existing clusters. Is he right? Yep. The most recent example. Firethorn. Financial services meets telecommunications. Acquired by Qualcomm for $210. Cha-ching!
Look at opportunities at the intersection of existing clusters. They are big. That really gives me hope.
But what would really, really give me hope is if everybody stops comparing here versus there. There wins. End of discussion. So let's talk about something interesting. What do you do to seize the opportunity?
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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