Establish your Online Identity and Personal Brand: Beginner’s Guide Part 2

Facebook
What it is: “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” in other words (although Mark Zuckerberg does not like the term) a “social network”
Although Facebook is great not only for staying connected with your friends, sharing pictures, etc, do not go overboard with pictures or applications that you would not be comfortable showing to an employer, client, family or the press. Despite privacy settings, it is important to maintain a consistent online identity on all social media services.

Do’s

• Publish your job experience and education
• Import your blog feeds or friendfeed (more on that below)
• Write a mini-bio – your value proposition, this should be consistent on all websites.
• Post a link to your blog or microblog (more on that below)
• Interests related to your field of expertise
• Join/Create Groups related to your industry
• Create or join events related to your industry
• Clean your profile’s wall from incriminating/indecent comments
• Place an easy to identify headshot of you as your profile picture

Dont’s

• Tag your drunk/party/club keg-stand pictures
• Leave indecent comments on walls
• Broadcast your relationship status or age (year of birth)
• If you join groups that your mom/employer/client/investor/publicist would not approve of, just go to your privacy settings and make the groups you join invisible
• Reveal religious/political affiliations (unless your field of work is in religion or politics)
• Play mysterious or curious with your name – John “DANGER” Doe nor John DD
• Put a logo/family picture/cartoon/etc as your profile picture

Myspace
What it is: “Myspace is another social network”
Disclaimer: Unless you are working in the entertainment industry or promoting a consumer brand, stay away from myspace for identity management and business networking.

LinkedIn
Business oriented networking website helpful on facilitating business opportunities, job seeking, employees seeking.

Do’s

Import all your contacts from all your e-mail address books

• VERY IMPORTANT: Get coworkers/clients/employers to write a testimonial for you (you can find at least 3 people that like you, right?)
• Participate in the Q&A, it will give you exposure to people not directly in your network, and give you the opportunity to show your expertise by helping others.
• Fill out as many fields in your profile with as much pertinent detail as possible.

Dont’s

• Spam the Q&A
• Mass invite random people
• Get creative with your name “John THE BEST MARKETER EVER Smith”

twitter – social network and microblogging service where you can post up 140 characters at a time.
Disclaimer: It seems useless at first, but dive in and add people in your area, from your already existing contacts, and your industry.

Do’s

• Tweet important events and happenings
• Post links to interesting news stories or blog posts related to your field

Dont’s

• Tweet your very personal activities (when you take a shower, when nature calls, when you wake up, etc)
• Only post links to your blog/posts
• Tweet too much (if you dour tweets will loose their value)

Friendfeed- is a service that consolidates all your social network services you are subscribed to, making it easier to get a follow up of your updates, and bookmarks.

Do’s
-Import more than one service, having only one Twitter or Flickr feed makes for a boring friendfeed account.

Dont’s
- Import your tumblr feed into your FriendFeed and your FriendFeed feed into a tumblr, the Social Media Universe WILL collapse. Trust me. (Ok, so it won’t collapse, it will just create endless loops that take forever to clean up)

Deli.cio.us- is a social bookmarking Internet service that help you store, share, and find out about web bookmarks of your interest.

Do’s
-Bookmark sites of your interest

Dont’s

• Bookmark sites that can question your integrity, moral or values. (if you want to bookmark something risque, just click on the “do not share” checkbox
• Bookmark sites more than once
• Bookmark only posts done by you

Tumblr – another microblogging service that does not limit you to 140 characters. It allows you to have a blog presence but without the drag of writing full posts. Just post links, quotes, videos, or text.

Do’s

• Post about interesting events you find, or posts you have read
• Install the Firefox toolbar

Dont’s

• Post too much unrelated content too frequently, or your posts wont be taken seriously

GENERAL TIPS

• Make for all your suscribed services, congruent information about you such as with same picture and profile, this will help you stablish faster your image in the web.
• Agregate all aplications to friendfeed
• Be careful not to over do it with the microblogging services, the value of your information can reach a declining rate of return, this means that if you post too many links to frequently or you give too much detail too frequently, the value of that piece of information will decrease to those that are subscribed to you.