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.
Taking Mapping to the Next Level; Tripline
About a month ago I was watching a Microsoft webcast about API enhancements for Bing Maps and the gears really started turning. We’ve all used maps to lookup directions, do some reconnaissance of an area before a road trip, keep track of biking or running activities, you name it and there’s probably a mapping application for it. That said, at the time I couldn’t really think of any good mapping services for travel; services that would allow you to map way points geographically or by address, add comments, add photos, share with friends, etc. Low and behold, about a week ago Marc Anderson (@sympmarc) mentioned Tripline in a blog post (albeit completely unrelated to mapping). Tripline is one of those services that you may have never heard of (I hadn’t), but it is certainly worthy of a post and a little discussion.
A few months ago I talked about Tripit Pro as a service for frequent travelers to help organize itineraries, track miles/points and share their travel with family, friends and colleagues. In Marc’s example, he was importing travel plans from Tripit into Tripline to create a rich interactive map of an upcoming vacation. For the travel nerds among us this is slick in itself, but as slick as that is it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Tripline supports importing from Foursquare, Twitter, Tripit and Gowalla. Using available geographical data, Tripline will construct a listing of all of the locations and map them using Google Maps. Obviously you can also create maps from scratch using search services or by manually adding points to the map. Once your map is constructed, you can reorder locations on the fly, add titles and comments to the map, and add comments to each individual location.
An Open Complaint to SiriusXM: The Hours Following the Post
A couple of days ago I wrote an article called Social Media Gone Wrong; An Open Complaint to SiriusXM, in which I threw the spotlight on the satellite radio giant for a number of issues both widespread and specific to me. Within hours of posting, the article quickly became one of the most viewed posts on my blog so I figured that in the interest of being fair and balanced the topic was worth a follow-up.
One of the claims that I made in the post was that SiriusXM had ignored all of the requests I made for help via social media (Twitter being the channel I turned to after numerous phone calls failed to solve my issue). While Twitter is not an official communications channel for the company I figured it was worth a shot, after-all one of the first rules of social media strategy is to monitor your mentions and reach out to your customers as applicable. Frustrated that no reply came after a handful of tweets over a 10 day period, I resorted to my blog, wrote the post, and published it through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Admittadly, what happened next surprised me.
Social Media Gone Wrong; An Open Complaint to SiriusXM
In previous blog posts, we’ve looked at effective use of social media as a tool to enhance customer service, interact with your customers, and provide dynamic information to your customers (both current and prospects). Any social media consultant or power user will tell you (and we’re talking about businesses again here) that the absolute worst thing you can do is fail to monitor or respond to your Twitter account. Twitter is far more mainstream now than ever before, and users have come to expect that little bit more; the assumption is there that if you’re on Twitter, you’re actually on Twitter. That said, it’s certainly scalable and varies company by company; ideally you should be monitoring and responding at least daily, but for smaller companies a couple times a week, or weekly may be sufficient. Along this topic, let me share an example of a company that completely fails to understand this concept (or customer service in general).
In January of 2006 I became an XM Satellite Radio customer, and since that time have spent over $1700 on monthly service for several radios. In July of 2008 XM merged with (technically was acquired by) Sirius to form a new parent company (SiriusXM) to manage both companies. Technically the two companies operate separately, though to the end user they’re one in the same. The legacy XM and Sirius websites have been replaced by SiriusXM.com, and you can manage legacy XM, legacy Sirius, and new SiriusXM branded radios through this single portal. That said, there’s two areas where they have completely and utterly failed during this process. Charlie Sheen would wouldn’t say they’re #winning; to us IT folk maybe that becomes #!winning, or #<>winning.
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.
Twitter Goes SSL
As a follow-up to my previous post about Facebook implementing SSL, in the last few days Twitter has followed suit and implemented SSL on Twitter.com. Enabling HTTPS is as easy as going to your account settings page, scrolling down to the bottom, and checking the “Always use HTTPS” option. This will only be enforced when you’re actually using Twitter.com (not when using a third party application such as Hootsuite; though I still highly recommend Hootsuite), but it’s still a very good practice even for those random times that you click a link to twitter.com to view someone’s profile. This also does not apply to mobile.twitter.com if you’re using the native Twitter website on your smartphone, but speculation is that HTTPS will soon be extended to that arm of the Twitterverse, and if you’ve already enabled it in your account profile it should automatically take effect if/when the developers over at Twitter implement it.
While you’re in your profile enabling the shiny new HTTPS feature, it’s a great idea to review the various applications and third parties that you’ve given access to your profile. Any Twitter client (ie: Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Twitter for Facebook), or any website that’s integrated with your Twitter account (ie: Foursquare, LinkedIn, or About.me) was at some point granted access to your account by you. Many of us (myself included) are guilty of activating applications just to see what they are, and forget to go back in and revoke the access to it once we’ve stopped using it. This potentially opens your account up to unnecessary/unwanted activity, so it’s a best practice to frequently review the applications that are connected to your account and remove those you no longer need. Simply click the Connections tab in your account settings, and revoke access to any applications you’re no longer using.
(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.
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.