Unveiling: New Branding
With some slight change of direction planned for my blog, I figured it was time to do a bit of rebranding. In line with my previous rumblings about personal brand awareness and About.me, I did a full ground-up rebranding including a complete theme refresh, navigation refresh, and re-categorization of every legacy post. I’ve also branded my Twitter and About.me profiles to match.
LinkedIn, 100M & Growing Strong
This morning, Donna Antoniadis (@DonnaAntoniadis) tweeted a link to an article about LinkedIn hitting 100 million members, and it got me to thinking about the size of the core social media networks. Many of us in the professional world have a LinkedIn profile, but because LinkedIn is rarely in the media, the perception is there that it’s a much smaller network. At 100 million users it’s still “significantly” smaller than Twitter (with ~175 million active accounts), but on the corporate blog LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says they’re growing at a million new members every week, which is pretty significant for the site that puts the “networking” in social networking.
About.me: Next Gen. Digital Business Card
My account over at About.me was initially created just as an experiment to see what the platform was like. The more time I’ve spent customizing my profile, the more I’ve realized that About.me really has the potential to become the next generation digital business card.
Not only is the profile itself surprisingly customizable (check out the directory if you think I’m kidding), but the social network integration is among the cleanest I’ve seen in a while. When you add your various social networks to your profile you have the option of just making them links, or actually loading the content into About.me. I have noticed some quirks, Foursquare for example will not show how many checkins I’ve got no matter how many times I remove and relink it, and I can’t seem to figure out what permissions it’s using to Facebook (since I gave it full permission and it only found three photos of me). On the flipside, the integration to Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter seems spot on.
As the platform continues to develop, I expect it to get even more powerful; potentially to the point of being a central hub between networks. If you don’t have an account, head over to About.me and sign up (you’d hate to wait a year and not be able to get a cool URL).
(Personal) Brand Awareness
Successful brands have been balancing the line between print, web, and brick-and-mortar elements for decades. With the rapid adoption of social media, that trend has continued to the familiar social media tools we all use every day. The limitations of avatars, and sometimes little options for customization have forced us to be a little creative, but an uncompromising implementation of the brand is almost always possible.
Dell is one of those companies that has traversed the plethora of social media networks without compromising the integrity of the brand (which after-all, is the point). Support forums are easily recognizable with the Dell moniker, tweets carry the familiar Dell logo, the YouTube channel is heavily customized, and most importantly everything is consistent.
Now, you may be wondering why I put “Personal” in the title if we’re going to talk about Dell. The point here is that the same strategy of a major brand can also apply to your personal brand. There’s two schools of thought on personal brands: 1- branding is a big corporate term (so why should I care), and 2- there’s value in providing a consistent, recognizable, and professional image of yourself across multiple mediums. The first rule applies to those of you who are just casual users; you’re the people that use Facebook to just talk to family, Twitter to tell me that you and your BFF are going roller skating, and have no idea what LinkedIn is. For you, it doesn’t matter if your Facebook picture is a weekend snap of you drunk at a party, or your Twitter avatar is the default Twitter bird, because well, it just doesn’t matter. The second rule applies to anyone who uses a combination of these services in a professional capacity, such as selling a product, supporting a product, blogging, professional networking, or community involvement.
A Review of TripIt Pro
Back at the beginning of November I got an email from TripIt offering a free trial of TripIt Pro; the invaluable travel site that I’ve become addicted to in recent months. At first I didn’t think I’d care all that much about the additional “Pro” offering, as the base subscription seemed to do everything I wanted it to; boy was I wrong.
The base subscription gives you the itinerary and trip management side of things, which is fabulous. I’ve sent it airline, conference, hotel and rental car confirmations and it has never made an error in the import of the travel data. You can also assign multiple email addresses to your profile, so if you book business travel using a business email address and personal travel using a personal email address you can forward confirmations from both accounts to TripIt. The trip “sharing” isn’t incredibly robust, but certainly suitable for giving family or friends access to your trip if they’re planning to pick you up at the airport (as an example). So when that email came in during a quiet evening in mid-November, I figured I’d give TripIt Pro a try. The pro subscription takes the same base itinerary and trip management, and adds several robust tools.
Entrepreneur Video Series – Part 5
In this installment I bring you a crash course in “How to start a movement”, presented by Derek Sivers. I originally saw this video posted my Mark Miller (@EUSP) over at EndUserSharePoint.com and felt it worth the repost. Derek takes a humorous approach to outlining the various stages of a new movement. He raises some very interesting points, and following what he says you can easily see how the Facebook and Twitter movements took off; and why many of us ridicule our peers who don’t use such mediums to communicate.
Extend your brand; Friendly social media URLs
It’s no secret that your social media identities really are an extension of your brand. They’re powerful (often revenue generating) assets that in some cases may generate more traffic than your website. If you’re a company or organization that’s very active in the social media world then it’s probably in your best interest to promote your various social media identities on your company collateral, website, business cards, etc. That said, several of the popular social media platforms have failed in making your content easy for people to access. Sure, twitter.com/webdes03 and facebook.com/webdes03 are simple enough, but I don’t particularly find “http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-greene/5/576/4a5” something that belongs on a business card–and it’s certainly not something people are going to remember.
Luckily there’s a simple way to get yourself a friendly URL to replace that ugly one, and provide a consistent URL pattern to all of your social media identities. If your website is hosted with a company that gives you access to cPanel, Plesk, or one of the other popular hosting management tools, you can simply add a new subdomain and redirect it to the appropriate social media identity. Here’s an example of the process you’d follow to set this up using cPanel.
The Social Media Strategy
Melissa Woodard (@SocialMiss) made an interesting blog post earlier about the adoption of social media in the day to day operations of business. While some companies have embraced social media, others have a more casual approach to it. Some don’t quite know how to integrate the concept of social media into their business, and some still don’t quite get what social media is all about. Is social media hard to manage? No.
The plethora of cross-medium tools available today make it fairly easy for an individual (or team) to keep track of your social identity, but you do need to put some thought into it. Tools like Hootsuite can help you manage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. from a single tool (and support multiple users if you’re running a team of folks to help oversee your social media presence), but as great as Hootsuite is-it’s not going to hold your hand in making the right decisions with your social media identities.