Building Your Online Brand With Social Media Tools
Social Media tools have an enormous power to put you in contact with thousands of people. As I have said on numerous occasions though, attention on its own is useless, what are you going to do with that attention?
If you want to build your online brand you have to know how all your activities work together. You need a consistency and congruency. Each part of the social media puzzle builds into a picture people have of you, how they imagine you to be relates to how you really are to the degree you get this stuff right.
If you are approaching social media in a haphazard way, do not be surprised if things do not work out exactly as you hoped or imagined they would.
You Choose Who You Are
We are judged by what we say, how we say it and who we associate with. All choices we make, not things that happen to us by chance.
If you are constantly being seen with the snarky, attacking, abusive people on Twitter, then you will be seen as in their gang. When your pictures often appear in the saucier flickr groups then that is the impression people will have of you, regardless of your PHD in nuclear physics. We do not get the whole picture online, we see what is right in front of us, and that means we will jump to conclusions and you will be guilty until proven innocent.
Since Michael wrote about what your social media activities say about you I have been thinking about this a lot. Having been online for a long time, there is not much I can do to claw back what is out there. I haven’t exactly played fast and loose with my online reputation, but then I have not been too sophisticated with it either.
I have clients from all sorts of industries and walks of life. Who my clients are have been used to attack me in the past. Should I with this in mind be revealing my clients through StumbleUpon votes?
Best to choose now who you are, what your values are, and where you draw the line between openness and TMI (too much information). Thankfully I clued up about 10 years ago some things I would never write about, but still there are aspects of my life I think really ought to have been kept private.
Joining the Social Media Dots
The best way to approach social media is to choose your venues and connect them in some way to your blog. Keep your blog as the main representation of “you” online. That is where you best stuff is going to be, your archive, portfolio or resume. If someone Googles you, this is what you want to appear, not your virtual facebook sheep or your drunken accidental flickr pics.
With a good core blog, you can further reinforce this positive brand. Have conversations on Twitter, share your pictures, guest post and comment. Participate in forums that relate to what you do and your audience. Above all where you want connections to be made, use a consistent avatar, nickname and style. Connect all the profiles back to your blog, and where appropriate link out to the social media sites.
As you can see, I link to my Twitter account from here and occasionally will link to my Flickr through my pictures. While this helps grow my connections on those services it does mean that I have to use privacy settings on Flickr and on Twitter I need to be aware of what I am saying!
Are you conscious about the brand you are building in social media sites or do you just try to be yourself and let people take away what they will? Do you connect your online activities or are they in silos? Please share your thoughts in the comments …
Posted on May 14th, 2008 by Chris Garrett in Blogging
I have built my online presence very carefully, knowing from the beginning that things that go online never go away. I believe that it has helped build my brand in a positive way.
I am using new things (new for me) like Twitter and Utterz to keep in touch with, and strengthen new associations. I believe that they also have uses that we have not discovered yet.
Been giving this a lot of thought myself recently, especially as one of my oldest “nicknames” isn’t very conducive to business
A timely post! I run around the internet wearing two very different hats - it just sort of ‘happened that way’ - and lately have been struggling to think of a way to bring both together into some kind of cohesive identity. What you say makes great sense, and setting up a ‘portfolio’ blog might very well resolve the dilemma. Must think about how best to do that… Thanks for the pointer!
Thanks for the article, Chris! I came to it via twitter. I am in the phase of experimenting with twitter - I am writing a photoblog and using my flickr account. I can imagine how to use twitter to built my Online Brand, but until now I’ve got no idea how to use stumbleupon (sorry for that stupid question, but there I am a total newbie). It would be great if you could dwell a bit upon stumbleupon as a tool to built an Online Brand. Thanks in advance!
(english is not my native language, so please excuse my use of it)
I think this is great advice. I have three blogs that are distinct, and it has taken me a while to come to a concrete decision/understanding about how to represent them through Twitter, Facebook, etc. while maintaining one social media face. Some people know me for one topic, and some for another. I’ve decided that it’s better to brand “me” than it is to brand my blogs, per se, since focusing only on branding each blog reinforces them as silos. Social media has encouraged me to reel it all in and think critically about my personal brand and how I can use that to attract and build my audiences. It requires one to be both the doer and the observer.
Great post, thanks. Since I first created an online profile (on MySpace) I viewed it as an advertisement, as a way to build the “Roger Harris” brand. However, it’s hard to disentangle personal activity (which you’d rather not share with everyone) from business-related (brand-building) activity. This is where consolidation tools come in. Recent moves by Google, MySpace and Facebook testify to the strong pressure for consolidation, a necessity that I blogged about several weeks ago. From Google, we have “Friend Connect,” whereas MySpace will offer “Data Availability” and Facebook will roll out “Facebook Connect.” These tools will, hopefully, streamline and simplify the task of building your online brand with social media tools.
I think you’re right on the money Chris. Since pretty much everything you do online can be traced, it’s even more crucial to be aware of the trail you leave behind wherever you go.
But if I understand you correctly what you’re saying is that your blog becomes the nexus of you online presence, your online brand. Right? Well, what if you’ve split you interests amongst different blogs - say a gaming blog, a professional blog and a personal one. Which blog becomes the center piece of your online brand? All of them? Equally?
And here’s another question: what if you’ve build your brand using a nickname (CrazyKinux), instead of your real name because it’s all too common (David Perry)? Can you still have the same impact? Have I still got an online brand?
I do know the answers to some of these questions -or else I would not have invested all this time building CrazyKinux as my online brand. Nevertheless, I’m very curious to know what others think, including you Chris.
Thanks for another great post by the way!
David “CrazyKinux” Perry