Daniel Johnson, Jr.

I’ve been a part of an interesting discussion on Facebook recently about where to draw the line between personal and business use of social media, and it prompted me to share these thoughts about strategies for managing an online presence.

You are a brand

Everyone who comes in contact with you in-person or online leaves with an idea of who you are as a result of the experience.  While what happens in real-life might be fleeting or temporary, what happens online sticks around.  Many of us have camera phones that can take pictures or video and upload them with ease to the internet.  Did you just get tagged in a career-limiting photo on Facebook? Or did someone capture that great picture of you helping someone out in your community?

Is what you do online adding to or detracting from your personal brand?

Some points to keep in mind:

• Everyone’s use of social media will vary, and that’s okay. It’s a free world.
• Know your goals in developing and maintaining an online presence. These will dictate how you use the tools.
• Your goals may and probably will change over time. So will your use of the tools.
• Don’t expect to stay on top of everything. You’re only able to sample a bit of information at a time. You can set up monitoring stations, for sure. That’s a topic for another blog post.

Strategies

With these points in mind, here are six strategies you can employ to develop and manage an online presence:

1. Dump it. There are times when you no longer need or want to have that blog, account, etc. It might be worthwhile to just delete the account altogether.
2. Shelve it. Maybe you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling with your blog, account, etc., but you’re not quite ready to delete it. Maybe you’ll get back to it sometime; maybe you won’t. So you leave it alone for another day. Over the past 7 years or so, I’ve created over 10 blogs. Most of them lie dormant now or have moved to another space.
3. Anonymize it. There are advantages and disadvantages of setting up an anonymous online presence. On one hand, you have virtual free reign in what you can say and do without having it come back against you. Some folks opt for this strategy by using a pseudonym or nickname. On the other hand, you aren’t able to transfer the equity in your online brand into your offline career. But maybe that’s not your goal in the first place. Maybe you want to have one account for everyone and another, more private account where you can say whatever you want to say.  I started off using a nickname on some social networks but later opted to use a more distinct form of my real name.
4. Merge them. If you have multiple accounts, blogs, etc., maybe they’ve become overwhelming for you. Maybe you want to present a clearer message across one social networking presence. In this case, it might be worthwhile to merge.
5. Link them. If you still want to keep multiple online identities, then consider linking them to one another, so that others can know where you are. I do that with blogs and in my Virtual Business Card.  Something like this is useful if you’ve signed up with different usernames on different platforms. It’s also useful, for example, if you leave one blogging platform, for another, to cross-link the two.
6. Aggregate them. Similar to linking, another strategy is to aggregate your multiple presences using a tool like FriendFeed. This place becomes a one-stop shop for everything you put online.

So remember that what you do online says a lot about who you are – or who we think you are.  How you decide to use social networking tools is completely up to you, and your goals should dictate how you use them, and there are different strategies you can employ.

Agree? Disagree? Did I miss anything? What other strategies have you found useful?

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Tags: online personal brand, personal brand, social media, social media strategy, strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under branding, Featured, social media networks, social media strategy, strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.