You.com

You.com

Cresta Norris  //  I am writing a book called 'You.com' about how to manage your online self for success, profit, image and business success. The book will be published by Kogan Page next year, and available in all good book shops.

This blog contains my early thoughts about creating a business guide to harnessing new and merging online and social media tools to improve your profile on-line. Creating a personal brand online is an essential skill in our fast moving digital age where everything we say do and write is preserved forever in a virtual footprint.

So this blog is exploring how to create your personal brand, and how to recover from any personal references that the internet does not forget and can be found on search engines world wide.

The American Business coach Tom Peters was the first to suggest that ‘you’ can take ownership of yourself as a brand, and the process where people and their careers are marked as ‘brands’ is known as personal brand management. To survive in the connected world of digital information you need to manage your own brand across both business and personal life. This blog will start to tell you how to manage your online personal brand to its best advantage in a world where no one has a job forever and everyone has to manage what Charles Handy calls a ‘portfolio’ career.

 
Dec 17 / 2:53am

Image via tweeting?

Is it just stars that have a twitter following or could you build an online image with tweeting?
My view is no, you need to be well known (or part of a community) before you tweet.
OK the stars have big audiences:
  • Stephen Fry 1.128 followers
  • Ellen DeGeneres 3.9 million followers
  • Britney Spears 1 million
  • Oprah Winfrey 2.7 million

    but if you are a MD with a large company you too will have a following - or if you are an expert (university professor) or an artist exploring new work, then your views are just if not more valid...

    My advice is to start tweeting about a niche subject which has a passionate following - train spotting anyone?

     

     

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    Dec 17 / 12:42am

    The four P's of Personal Marketing

    Years ago at the London Business School I was taught the four P's of marketing
    Product
    Place
    Promotion
    Price
    Thinking about those four ideas in terms of personal online marketing -
    Product - is your brand and your packaging (that's your photo, your biography, and most important ...your ideas )
    Place - is distribution both the online place and the media you use -  your web site, your facebook, your linked in and the media you are using such as video or audio
    Promotion - is your advertising - that is your blog or coverage

    Price -  is the reaction of your competitors, and its measured in time spent on your image.

     

     

     
    Dec 10 / 12:56am

    Privacy on Facebook

    The American Civil Liberties Union is worried about privacy on Facebook since the change in their privacy settings (see earlier post). They made a statement yesterday saying that now you have no way of preventing your profile picture, current city, friends list, gender, and fan pages from being public information to any other Facebook user.

    This is great news for all of us parents who need to see our children's friends list and fan pages. But not so good if you are looking for a job and would like to keep some information about your friends list private.  

     
    Dec 3 / 5:11am

    Why the press release is dead

    In the old days a press release told a story that the company wanted to be heard. But now information when released online becomes something we engage with. Your ideas are available for other people to talk about - the information can be reacted to and shared, it can be connected with and conversed over. The old press release was one dimensional, now it can be expanded with comments and links and different facts and different points of view. 

    To quote Arianna Huffington of Huffington post

    ' the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community. And conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.'

     

     
     
    Dec 2 / 8:53am

    Privacy settings

    Why would Facebook want to update the privacy settings? Perhaps users are realising that privacy online is an important facility... apparently Facebook's  new privacy page is going to be easier to control, but I imagine that new users (and young people) and of course all the technophobes will be happy with that.  On the other hand I've not doubt that most people can work out ways of infiltrating the pages they want to view -  oh well at least they are trying -

     

     
    Nov 27 / 7:26am

    Visual images

    Just reading a blog by David McCandless who is writing a book about visual information. He says ' In a subtle but steady way we're all becoming visualisers now. Daily exposure to the internet is creating an incredibly visually literate generation. We're looking at visual design and information visualisation every day. So we're used to having, and we're demanding, information in colourful, designed, visual forms.' What is interesting for us lonely individuals worried about image online is that he points out that 'a wide variety of online tools are emerging which can help those without design experience to start playing with visualisation.'

    He suggests looking at:

    Wordle that allows you to make 'word clouds' out of the most frequent words in a document.

     

    ManyEyes, from IBM,which auto-generates bubble charts, semantic maps and other types visualisations out of spreadsheets and data that you upload.

     
    Nov 25 / 12:39am

    LA Times online guidelines

    The LA Times have just updated their social media guidelines for their journalists: (http:latimes.com/socialmedia)

    Its a well thought out list of what not to do online. I will try and speak to their standards and practises committee to find out how they developed their list - and how often they update their guidelines. Many of them are just as useful for individual image management as for journalists.
    Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.
    • Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.
    • Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.
     
    Nov 24 / 8:34am

    Public Space

    There is some interesting thinking at public organisations about the use of what is described as 'public space'.  In defining their role as a public service broadcaster the BBC refer to the British tradition of public space -  to quote their DG
    'not just the BBC but our universities, our museums and galleries, many of our orchestras, the RSC, the National Theatre, our great national parks. In fact, so much of our collective cultural and social life exists not in the bi-polar universe of market and state, but in a third space. Public space. '

    So where is the 'public space' on-line? It does exist. It's to be found in open codes and blogs and face-book sites that are open and authentic and not for profit. What is it for? It's a place for ideas and sharing material. When I was in Pompeii I saw the walls of the Forum where the citizens painted slogans and ideas, and our public forum is the on-line world. The online world is our present day public space forum.

     

     
    Nov 20 / 1:03am

    The fine line between business social media and our private lives

    Jen, at Graham-Maw Christie has drawn my attention to this article from the Guardian which has three good lessons about Tweeting:

    Our after-work life is rapidly disappearing, and being replaced by a non-working life. It remains to be seen if increased transparency regarding our private lives will make employers more tolerant - or make employees better behaved. "The business use case in Twitter is turning out to be very important," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said yesterday as the company announced the possibility of cross-posting tweets to the professional network LinkedIn. Fine. But careful with that.

    Think twice about tweeting that you hate your new job, but are grateful for the fat paycheck. And you might want to consider changing your job if you want to express your sexuality but you are a teacher. Those people with a second, non-work-related, Facebook account or Twitter identity can do a lot anonymously, but yes, they have to manage their identities. And the London Underground worker who lost his job after rude comments he made to an elderly passenger were circulated on the internet might struggle for sympathy.

    In fact, most of the problems have nothing to do with new media, but are simply because people tend to forget their manners online. As behaviour is very important in public and we all live public lives now, etiquette is making a comeback. Since my boss is a nice boss, he reminds us all from time to time that he is following us on Twitter. However, don't forget that these days camera phones and Twitterers are everywhere, so each of us can become a representative of our company wherever we go. Here are my three rules:

    • Don't be rude. Don't be abusive about people, projects or your company. You might feel that you can talk behind someone's back to your friends and they will never find out - but it is becoming increasingly likely that they will.

    • Don't post rumours or reveal things about colleagues, partners, projects or your own job situation. Being the first is old media, while being to the point is new media. And Twitter never forgets.

    • Post at haste, repent at leisure - it is easy to write something in the heat of the moment that you will come to regret, so wait until you have calmed down. Even though private is the new public, some things are better left private.

     
    Nov 17 / 8:40am

    Generate a new identity?

    I've been having fun on a fake name web site - www.fakenamegenerator.com. It has given me a fake identity: I am now (and until Feb 2020)

    Grace H. Allan

    16 Guild Street
    E5 5FP
    LONDON
    I've got a fake e-mail address (GraceHAllan@text2re.com ) and a password and phone number and birthday and everything....my mother's maiden name is now Godfrey!  What is more I am free to use it under the Fake Name Generator identities by the Fake Name Generator are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

    I like what is fake. I enjoy and relish the un-real. Altered reality is fun.
    The paradox of our online world is is that the more contrived the world appears, the more we all need things that are real. Pretending, or faking, may be fun but ultimately is it not memorable – if you start to fake stuff you get caught out. In the online world if you are inauthentic you will be labelled fake. The fake Grace will not have my expertise or passion.

    Sometimes online it is hard to know what is real or what is fake at first glance, but having an identity that is congruent with your passion or values is real. Anything less is not true to you.

     

    Filed under  //  authenticity   fake identity   genuine