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Have you done a personal social media audit lately?

January 18, 2010 By 4 Comments

Have you done a social media audit of yourself lately? Maybe you should.

Cleaning supplies

Do your social media profiles need to be cleaned up? (Image by lusi at stock.xchng)

By social media audit, I mean updating all those profiles you have on various social media sites. I started doing this recently, and was surprised to find how much information I had let become out of date — my job title, what town I lived in, etc. In addition to profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Plaxo, don’t forget your own bio on your blog, if you have one.

Here are five things to do during a social media audit:

1. Update all of your profile information. Have you moved, been promoted, changed employers or had any other changes since you last created that profile? Is there any information that’s out of date that should be deleted? In addition to the usual social networking sites (such as LinkedIn and Twitter), don’t forget to update your online profile in other groups you belong to — professional organizations, alumni associations, etc.

2. Update your profile picture, if you want. You may want to use different pictures on different sites, to highlight different aspects of your personality. Or you may want to use the same picture across all sites for personal branding consistency. It’s up to you, but ask yourself if you need to add or update pictures to any of your social media profiles.

Tip: Keep a profile picture or two in Flickr. That way you have it available to add to any social media profile no matter what computer you are working on (home, work, school or whatever).

3. Get active on sites that you’ve ignored for a while. I’m not suggesting you should be really active on every social media site — there are too many for that. However, if you’ve been neglecting your LinkedIn activity and that’s a part of your plan for personal branding via social media, it’s worth spending some time there. (And making a plan for being there more consistently.)

4. Record all those passwords somewhere. If you’re like me, you have profiles and passwords to lots of different sites. I have a couple of tricks for remembering them all, but too often I have to rely on the “forgot your password” link. Start recording these somewhere (safe). I’m using index cards that are filed alphabetically in a little box I keep on my desk at home. If you’re paranoid about security, you can lock this in a safe. There are many software solutions available for this (Clipperz is very secure, but if you forget your password to the site, you’re screwed).

5. Bookmark all your social media sites in a single folder in your favorites/bookmarks app. I use Google’s Bookmarks tool in the Google Toolbar, so I have access to my favorite web sites anywhere I have an Internet connection. This will give you quicker access to these sites and increase the odds that you keep them up-to-date and active in the future.

Are there other steps you would take to make sure your social media presence is current? Please share your ideas in the comments below.

Filed Under: Career, networking, Personal branding, Social media Tagged With: ,

How to say thank you for good things that happen online

September 30, 2009 By 4 Comments

When someone does something nice for you — and especially when they do without you asking first — it’s appropriate to say thank you. And offline, that’s pretty easy. You can say thank you in person or over the phone, write a thank you note, send a nice gift (a bottle of wine always works for me), or even buy someone lunch (or a drink).

However, online relationships are a bit trickier. Sometimes we don’t really know the people we interact with online, beyond, say, a Twitter account. But with just a Twitter account someone online can do some nice things for you – tweet a blog post you’ve written, include you in a #followfriday recommendation or just say nice things about you. How do you respond? How do you thank people in an appropriate, meaningful way?

Here are three ideas:

  • Return the favor. Retweet, include them in your #followfriday recommendations or publicize a blog post through one or more of your online identities.
  • Thank them offline. Send a handwritten note, make a short phone call or, if you’re feeling really generous, send a gift card or a small card. It may take a little extra time to figure out how to do this. Maybe you look up where the person works and send something to his or her office, maybe you figure out who their literary agent or publisher (for authors) is and send something through that route. Be brief, be nice, be polite – but don’t stalk. The point here is to thank people, not make them nervous.
  • Talk them up offline. If someone is doing good work, recognize it in your real-world conversations. When I talk to people who want to understand better how social media works in marketing and public relations I frequently recommend they check out David Meerman Scott’s blog or get his books. I think he does great, smart, work, so I talk him up. He may never know this, but in exchange for the insight his work has provided me, I think it’s good karma to pass along his name and web site to others.

How do you thank people? Please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Filed Under: Career, Miscellaneous, networking

Why I'm becoming more promiscuous online

July 31, 2008 By 4 Comments

Are you conservative, friendly, open or promiscuous?

People use social media sites to network online in different ways, and you can classify them in roughly four categories.

Conservative: If you’re a conservative networker online, you’ll connect only to people you know in real life. It might even be just the people you know well and like.

Friendly: You’ll connect to people you know or have at least met in real life, even if it was only on a conference call, regardless of how well you know them.

Open: You’ll connect to anybody you’ve had some sort of contact with, online or off, even if the contact was as limited as following their tweets (or them following yours).

Promiscuous: You’ll connect to anybody, even complete strangers. You’re always looking for an excuse to send that invitation to link, always willing to accept one.

Ex-conservative becoming more promiscuous

Over time, I’ve progressed from the conservative end of this spectrum to promiscuous.  Why? Because it’s on that wide-open end of the spectrum that online social networking is so powerful.

Here’s what I mean. On the conservative end of the scale, where you’re connected to a relatively small number of people who you already know pretty well, social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook aren’t that much more useful than Microsoft Outlook. They give you a way to keep in touch electronically with people you already know, but that’s about it.

But as you make your online network wider and deeper, it becomes more and more difficult, and eventually impossible, to have the kind of personal relationship with each individual that you had when you were conservative. The connections in these broader networks are looser, the personal communication increasingly infrequent, the relationships weaker. But they are still connections, still relationships.

You can send out your status updates, pass along a useful link, maybe ask a question. Most of the people in your loose network may not pay a lot of attention, most of the time, but your status update — your ping to your network — is a way of maintaining at least a weak connection, but without being intrusive. Everyone is opted in. Anybody can opt out.

Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter, our blogs and the rest of the social media universe allow you to maintain more relationships at a greater distance, something that wouldn’t be practical for most of us offline.

Why would you want to maintain these weak relationships? Because when you need something (like a job), or want to know something (like an obscure piece of technical information) or have an idea you want to spread (maybe about the value of social networks and ‘weak’ relationships), you can tug the strings in your network and get more feedback than you ever could in your conservative real world network. Even though those connections are weak, if you ask the network for help, at least some people will respond.

So I’m becoming more promiscuous online. Want to follow me on Twitter? Go here. Want to connect to me on LinkedIn? I welcome it, find me here. Feel like friending me on Facebook? I’m friendly – go for it.

What about you? Are you a conservative networker online, or a prolific and promiscuous connector? Tell us about your online networking style, and why you’ve chosen that style, in the comments below.

Update: I’ve tweaked my approach just a bit. Please check out this post about my approach to Facebook. (Feb. 14, 2010)

Filed Under: Career, networking, Social media Tagged With: , , ,
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