Posts Tagged "Social Media"

My Digital Identity

Posted by ngreene on May 28, 2010 in Featured, Media

Have you ever tried Googling yourself?

If not, I recommend it.

You need to be aware of what people who search for you will find, good and bad.

I recently realized that, even with what I consider to be a fairly unique name, I wasn’t one of the first things that comes up when Googled. It turns out that I share my name with a Christian visual artist, a professional golfer, a prominent American General, and when you add my city into the search, a local rapist.

Taking control of my digital identity became important to me. First of all, I wanted to be found where people are looking for me. I have public access profiles on facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo (no idea if this has any value), foursquare, brightkite, and now this blog site.

I didn’t expect to pop up in search results right away, but it turns out that Google is pretty quick at picking up the blog if you use the right search terms. Surprisingly, I get Google, Yahoo and Bing referred traffic every day.

So, I know that I want to be able to be found with the right kind of information when someone is looking for me. And I know that in order to be found I need to live at least part of my life in a publicly accessible way. Which brings me to a new challenge. What are the repercussions of living a more public life?

Let’s muddle through some of the pros and cons:

On the pros side, I am starting to show up when people look for me. You still need to dig a bit, and you need to choose the right search terms, but I am now findable. I would love to overtake one of my namesakes, but that will take some time given the head start they’ve had.

Another pro is that it’s an easy way for people to get to know me, or get to know me better. Despite being able to see the daily analytics of the types of people reading my blog, I’m always surprised to hear from someone in real life about what they thought of one of my posts.

On the cons side, I need to assume that absolutely anybody who can be offended by anything that I have to say will read my blog. I also have to assume that anything that can be interpreted offensive in any way, will be interpreted that way.

I’ve also learned that my time commitments to other things can come into question. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone challenge me as to how much time I spend writing as opposed to other obligations. The fact is that I could easily be spending 10x as much time as I do writing on home renovations, playing games, working after hours, exercising, riding my motorcycle, or just hanging out with friends and nobody would have any idea whatsoever.

With the exception of my wife, nobody could possibly be around me enough to know how I spend my personal time, nor should anyone justifiably have an opinion on the matter. The problem with having a public blog is that it seems like an easy target because it’s available. The irony to me is that I actually do most of my writing either in bed or in moments when I am stuck somewhere waiting for something, and usually on either the iPhone or iPad using the WordPress App. I always have 5-10 entries in the can at various states of readiness and I always schedule my new posts to publish at 12:30pm on the release date. I often forget that a new post is up because my day is busy.

I can see a future where everyone has to have some sort of digital identity. You can get away without being completely digital today, but I don’t think that is going last for much longer. When someone is looking for something, they Google it. Why not go one step further and make all people Googlable?

Eventually, there will be more of us who want to access information about people digitally than people who fear what that digital access means. I’ve said before that I am willing to share certain information with corporations and governments so that I can have a more relevantly personalized digital experience.

I am also willing to sacrifice some private thoughts and opinions in order to be found in a meaningful way when something I have to say strikes a chord with another person, whether I know them or not, and whether they agree with me or not.

N

Social Media by the Numbers

Posted by ngreene on Mar 26, 2010 in Media

I found a great Twitter post today and I immediately bookmarked the link, but couldn’t find the post again when I looked for it.

This is the best collection of Social Media Infographics I have ever seen. I’ve actually seen a lot of these on Mashable, but not in such an easy to use format.

Click on the image below to go to the collection:

I’m putting this post up as much so that I can find it later for use in presentations and to win arguments as I am posting it to share something interesting.