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5 Things to do to Organize your Personal Brand Online

13 July 2009 in Educating by Kate | Comments

Need a weekend project? How about organizing your personal brand on the web?

We’ve been dealing a bit with “online personal branding” with the executives of some of our portfolio companies, and one of the biggest things we’ve noticed is the feeling of being out of control of “where you are” online. People don’t realize how many places they are or how many profiles they’ve set up.

The first step to creating an effective Web2.0 personal brand is organizing the existing presence you’ve got. From there, you have focused content in a controlled number of places and can move forward in a clear direction. Below are a few things you can do on a slow afternoon to get the process started.

Create lists and purge. Do a full centralization process on what platforms you have profiles on, what your user names and passwords are, and what the function of each list is. Record everything in one place so it’s easier to do work. Then, get rid of anything that’s not useful or not moving toward your end goals (they can professional or personal). That Friendster profile from 5 years ago? Sorry Friendster, but you’re just not working for me any more.
Consistency is key. Make sure that your avatars are consistent (you don’t have to have just one profile photo, but keep it to 2-3, especially if you’re talking about using these services for primarily professional purposes). Use the same or similar bios or about paragraphs. Update them all at the same time.
Do a search on yourself. Yeah, everyone does this. But analyze it, record any notable mentions, or worrisome mentions. You might find something worth showcasing on a profile. You also might find a profile you forgot about or didn’t even know existed. You want to know what’s out there, so do the search. Try out a few different search engines too. Yes, people do still use MSN search and yes those results can vary from Google.
Connect and aggregate whenever you can. If you can update on one tool and have that update hit several others, that means efficiency and streamlining. Use RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Friendfeed etc. This makes life a lot easier. If it helps you, you can also record what’s connected where (I use a pretty simple excel to keep track of it all).
Pull together all of your content and work for people. If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of content out there that people would only be able to find if they searched your name and felt like sifting through pages of results. Make it easier for people to see your body of work by giving them one access point. I contribute to several blogs, write articles for various publications, and have a bunch of one-off “things” out there that I want to make sure people see. I’ve set up my own website used (for now) as one place to go to see most of what I’ve done. I also plan on flushing out my personal Portfolio [Please note: Interfolio IS a client of ours].

Do you have any other advice on organizing your Web 2.0 Personal Branding? Do you have any favorite tools to accomplish this?

Random Thoughts: RSS Feeds and Book Introductions

3 November 2008 in Random Thoughts by Kate | Comments

I have two lingering thoughts I wanted to throw out there, sort of random. One is a call-to-action, one is a thought/question for everyone.

RSS Feeds and Biased Information

I was having lunch with Patrick Meier and Lokman Tsui about two weeks ago, and Lokman was talking about his dissertation topic at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He’s focusing, generally speaking, on the impact of citizen journalism on global news production (Lokman, correct me or expand here!).

It’s funny I decided to post what was probably the the least interesting part of our talk, but it’s applicable to the way I run my life every day, and the way I think a lot of you run yours.

We were talking about how some technological advances, and the routines that come from them, have actually increased the bias of some media outlets. Who you call on for information, what channels you push content through, what you have access to. I chimed in with RSS feeds.

RSS feeds presumably make our lives easier for information consumption. That’s the idea at least. The other thing it does is almost guarantee you’re reading information from the same places, every day. In making it quick, you make it narrow.

I realized this a while back, so I make it a conscious effort to “clean out” my RSS feed (ideally) every week… might not happen every week, but at least I think about it. The other thing I do is add new sources to my RSS feed on a regular basis.

So there’s a constant influx of new information, and a purging of what I’ve deemed useless at that point. Some sources stay around consistently, some I’ve previously trashed come back, whatever. I don’t have any guidelines except that I want information from a varying number of places to guarantee I don’t rely on just a few.

[UPDATE (Monday night): Apparently, David Griner went through the same process on Friday, which I'm realizing now because he (has consistently) made my RSS feed cut]

So, do you “manage” your RSS feed effectively?

Book Introductions: What’s the point?

I just got my copy of David Meerman Scott’s new book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly (you can buy it here), which I’m excited to read [More on the book as I get further into it].

I started out with the Introduction.

Here’s the deal. I don’t read introductions as a general rule. I’ve only read the intros to books written by people I know and have a relationship with (David falls under this category). I skim the table of contents, maybe skim the intros quickly, but really, I just dive into the first chapter. I’ve always done this.

I know, I know. First rule of putting together a piece of communication is tell me what you’re about to teach me, teach me, the tell me what you just taught me (I’ve written and taught how to write enough pieces that this is engrained in my head). But in general, intros bore me.

Does this make me impatient? Am I missing something big?

David’s intro was nice enough, I think I took away something from it because I know him (intros get you into the head of the author? I don’t know). But I think I would have gotten the point starting to read (no offense David! It’s not YOUR intro, it’s just how I feel about them overall).

So tell me, AM I missing something? What do YOU get out of book introductions? Should I start reading them more? What makes a good introduction or a bad one?

Plugging RSS Feeds

10 February 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | Comments

Had you checked my inbox about three months ago, you have seen it completely chock full of email subscription to news sites, industry letters, institution reports etc. Politics, world events, marketing, Word-of-the-Day (yes, I am a geek) and more. Literally, we’re talking 20 or 30 or these I was signed up for.

I finally signed up for RSS feeds through bloglines (which I like, but if anyone has any advice on others they’ve found better, let me know). I emptied my email from subscriptions (which is incredibly cleansing and makes me somehow feign that I’m more organized). Now, my process is to always have my bloglines browser open (it has a ton of feeds on it right now), go through once a day (usually in the morning with a cup of coffee, it’s worth getting up half an hour early), read new postings as the day goes along (but not obsessively) and alwasy keep it clean. This is key, at least for me. If I don’t get on the internet for a day or two (everyone should try that), I just skim the postings quickly from the day before, and then delete everything past that. I don’t need it that much. Then the whole thing doesn’t get overwhelming, you have a few posts to read during the day and that’s it.

You can save the ones you want to go back to, and what I usually do as well is I’ll open the feed link to the full article and then read the articles from one feed all at once. For instance, let’s say I’m on BBC News and there are five news stories I want to read. I clean out the Feed on Bloglines, having opened up the articles I want to read further. Boom. BBC is done.

The thing is, I suck up so much information just on skimming. It’s amazing what skimming will do. You put in a little extra effort where you want to, but you get the general sense of what’s going on, and it’s completely manageable.

I also give kudos to Seth Godin for introducing AllTop to me, which basically aggregates a bunch of RSS Feed options under categories for you. The only next step would be to have me click which ones I want from those categories, and send me just one feed… someone get on that (and on that note, I still don’t understand why there are so many websites that don’t do “All Feeds” as an option, please change that too).

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Random Thoughts: RSS Feeds and Book Introductions

Plugging RSS Feeds

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