personal branding

This month’s topic over on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists is an interesting one and one that I voted for in our very democratic way of deciding December’s topic. What have you done to build your brand online?

See where you are online

The first thing I did was go and see what is out there about me on the internet. A quick Google of my name ‘ed walker’ made me realise first of all: a) I have a really common name b) There’s a ‘Sir Edward Walker’ - not me. Having a common name is the first hurdle in building a brand online, because if you’re called Japhael Jiminez - chances are you’re pretty unique.

Start a blog

Starting a blog is a must. This should be the core of your brand online. This is where you live and breath online. If possible try and buy your own domain and a bit of hosting, as having your name as a yourname.com/.co.uk/.net will help massively when it comes to boosting yourself up those all important Google rankings. After starting your blog and making it look pretty, get posting. Post about stuff that matters to you, it’ll probably matter to other people. Your blog should be your living CV, blog about stuff you’re working on, your success’ and even some of your failures. Make sure you’ve got an ace ‘About’ page, so that if people want to know more about you they can find out.

Link to people

You’re not going to build this brand alone. When posting on your blog, link out and link far and wide. If you link to people, they will probably come and look at your blog and see who you are. They might even link back if they like your stuff!

Have a good presence on LinkedIn

Forget Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc, LinkedIn is the professional networking site and it can be used by potential employers to find you and see who you are and what you do. Ensure your profile is fully filled out, keep it updated reguarly and you’ll be surprised how much traffic it can bring to your blog and also how highly LinkedIn profiles rank in Google and other search engines.

Claim your blog on Technorati

Technorati is the bloggers website. It’s important to claim your blog as this will tell you who is linking to you and give you an authority ranking. As more people link to you, your authority grows.

Listen to those who know

I suggest people like Chris Brogan and Adam Singer, who aren’t journalists, but have built up highly successful blogs and follows online. They have built a brand around themselves online, and as a result have benefitted financially but also in building up a big and useful network of contacts.

Network offline and transfer online

Face to face is still and always will be the most powerful communication tool in the world. Make use of it, at a networking event? At a party? Social media is reasonably in right now and while it may not be the best conversation starter it’s a great conversation finisher. Make sure you leave people you’ve been speaking to with your blog address, or if you’re a guest speaker make sure it’s on your slides.

Twitter and other social media

Make sure you’re using social media such as Twitter to join in the conversation, find and follow relevant people. Give people a reason to follow you by posting regularly and by posting interesting links to Twitter. Don’t tell us what you had for breakfast, that’s what Facebook status updates are for. Make sure all your social media presences link to your blog and that your blog links to all your social media presences. Think of your blog as the continent with lots of little islands around it.

Join relevant networks (like TNTJ!) and get networked

If there’s a network for your industry, join it and meet people. You’ll be surprised how interested they’ll be in what you do and what you may be blogging about.

Image in this post is used under creative commons from flickr user See-Ming Lee

setting up a blog about wine for my dad

My Dad is 56. He works as a field marketing manager for a wine company and has done for about five/six years. He’s got a Mac, loves them. He’s got a great knowledge of wine and often does tastings. I accompanied him to one at Burton on Trent wine society last week and on the drive back to London we got talking about how he loved doing tastings, attending wine events etc but that he lacks a focal point to bring people back to. Sure, he has his business card with an email address and a phone number but nothing to document all the wine knowledge in his head, the tastings he’s done, the massive wine events attended and the trips abroad to see vineyards in action.

My social media brain was whirring and I thought this is a great opportunity. My dad has something interesting to say, a subject he’s passionate about and he does interesting things with that subject. I need to get my old man blogging.

We sat down on Sunday morning with a piece of A4 paper and we planned it. First of all I showed him some blogs and how they worked, he was impressed. Then I asked him a series of questions:

1. What do you want to call the blog?

2. What is it going to be about?

3. How often are you going to update it?

4. What sort of content will you be putting on?

After that we went back to the web and we looked at some other wine blogs to get a feel for what they were doing. Some were really impressive while others seemed very out of date.

Dad decided that he wouldn’t be able to update his blog that often, due to work commitments but that he would have some regular features. We chopped his content up around categories (reds, whites, roset, sparkling, wine of the month, tasting reports, insights) and he started to plan his content for the next month or so.

We got him a wordpress blog to start off with, didn’t buy a domain or hosting as he needs to get used to it all first. He put in his first post about his wine of the month, he cropped a picture and uploaded that. “This is pretty easy”, he said. After that he wrote up a tasting report from the Burton wine society tasting and he learned how to link directly to another website (in this case we were linking directly to Tesco, Laithwaites etc where you can buy the wines that he used for the tastings).

In the first 48 hours of operations the blog has had more than 50 views, Dad was astounded. Also if we put ‘walkers world of wine’ into Google it was in the number one spot. We also got Dad a twitter account and linked it up to his mobile, so now he can twitter about wine or twitter about wine events that he’s at (like all the big trade tastings). 

In the space of a weekend, my Dad now has his own website and can update it easily and regularly. Of course I’ve got a log-in as an admin in case he’s got any problems, but he should be fine. He can start creating content about a subject he loves and sharing it with the world. It made me wonder, how many other experts are there out there who aren’t sharing what they do?

View Walker’s World of Wine blog or follow my old man on twitter

The above was the question posed for the November debate on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists and I gave my answer as ‘I’d invest it in people’.

The post is here, or you can read it below:

First off, I’d rather have a million pounds (British Sterling) than dollars to save journalism with. But exchange rates aside, let’s get down to business.

My strategy would be to invest in people. Invest in getting journalists to do that saving. You can’t do things alone, you need a good team with good people. I’d probably shed some dead wood from the news room, maybe coax a few people to leave early and get some fresh blood in.

I’d keep the subs, but expand their role to include a lot of backroom stuff - like picture uploading, digital media production, video editing. I’d keep the print edition but I’d make it follow online’s lead. Maybe just have one good strong print edition per day, and throw everything into online.

I’d develop strong supplements based around local issues, and not be afraid of trying something new. I’d link these supplements with mini-sites online built around that issue.

I’d invest in training for my staff, I’d employ the Google technique of 10% time for my reporters. i.e. 10% to go off and cover what YOU want and what YOU think needs covering.

I’d put a bit of money towards having trainees in. Not expecting them to pay for everything. There would be a pot of money so that kids can come in and get experience, learn about being a journalist, in a good environment, and not be skint afterwards. You never know, they might even bring a good story in with them - and that’s got to be worth the money.

I’d invest in a CRM (customer relationship management) system for my newspaper, logging user comments, offering them personalised news updates, and beginning to build an idea of who my readers really are. So I know that Joe Bloggs in the North of the city responds well to this type of news. Then I have something to sell, I’ve got proof of effectiveness, readership and grabbing people’s attention.

So to sum up, good journalists, probably better paid, more of them, getting some 10% time, with a good online setup.

Been watching the twitter voter report tick over, it’s incredible. So much data. Will we see anything like this in the UK when the next general election rolls around? You can’t beat it for that ‘being there at the polls’ feeling.

Few I’ve been reading today:

• Seven blog improvements you can make today

Yet more pearls of wisdom from Chris Brogan about how blogs can be improved. There’s a lot of these types of posts going round but I’m slowly collecting them and actioning the stuff that Chris and others are saying.

• What’s greater than sex?

One from the Social Media Marketing blog that I’ve just started following. It’s some interesting research that shows just how important the Internet is becoming to young men like myself.

• The bedroom Mourinho

Brings back memories of many hours spent crafting a championship winning side on Championship Manager!

Finally got through my feed reader backlog this evening, here’s a couple of highlights that are leaping out at me right now:

• Your marketing is (most likely) dated

Good call from Adam Singer, and I think we’re reviewing everything we currently do at work and changing tactics pretty soon.

• 25 ways to build your community

Chris Brogan with some great tips on how to build up your blog and build a community around it

• How to launch a group blog project

More from Brogan about a group blog and how to do it. Currently considering something like this to be used at work right now.

Just thought I’d give a shout out to our Give It A Go blog. We’re running our second Give It A Go event at the Students’ Union where I work and back in February we sent Emily Davies, our small but very tough news reporter off to ‘give it all a go’, and now she’s back again for two weeks of fun and frolics, with a few lectures in between.

We think that blogging the two weeks of great activities that happen across the Union is the best way to show off just how much is going on, and allow students the chance to comment on the events and give their reaction. While our official Give It A Go site is more about showcasing the events and providing an events listing of what’s on.

Had a read of Chris Brogan’s excellent post about how business’ need to start sharing or they are going to be in trouble.

He’s right, everything needs to be accessible and the old barriers within business’ need to disappear or it will be the business’ themselves who disappear. The very nature of the web is to share, I’m writing this blog post now and I’m sharing something with you. Someone tags this in delicious and shares it with their network, someone else emails it to a friend. It’s easy to share online.

That’s why it’s important that organisations, even the smaller ones like I work for, get their house in order and get everyone sharing. The flow of information around an organisation is almost as important as the flow of information from the organisation. I work for an organisation, a Students’ Union, who are a very sharing and caring kind of organisation, but there has to be a putting aside of old issues and a realisation that if the organisation is to move forward then information, best practice and most importantly ideas are not discussed behind closed doors but are passed around to be added to, taken away and made better.

While people hide behind job titles, department names and bottom lines then nothing will move forward. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if you’re not sharing with your colleagues ideas then things won’t happen. For public organisations there are definitely loads of ideas floating around about how to make things better, how to improve what’s already there - I’ve had many of them while developing the Union’s new website - but they never go anywhere other than into a pad to be thought about next year. What if that pad was online? You scribble a note, and everyone can see it an contribute. The staff intranet shouldn’t be a boring list of when the next fire inspection is, it should be a buzzing community of everyone having their say about the next big idea.

And if there’s not enough people to fulfil all the ideas, as inevitably with public organisations there aren’t, then share them with others. You’re not in competition, you’re all working towards a common goal. As Chris Brogan says:

Sharing is a new business tool. And it’s not really obvious. You have to think about the ways you can share, the ways you can’t. You have to weigh whether you’re giving away the best part, or if there’s plenty to go around (so often, the answer is B).

So there we go, how is this sharing going to happen? If the people at the top see the possibilities that social media can have the opportunities for innovation that are bubbling underneath them.

Thanks to Craig McGinty for flagging this one up. Craig posted about the Manchester Evening News’ great use of Dipity to create online timelines. They created one about the congestion charge in Manchester.

Could Dipity be the answer to the problem of trying to bring an audience up to speed on a long and complex issue? A journalist relies on the archives to remind themselves of what’s happened previously and I know from when I’ve been in newsrooms a trawl through past stories was essential. Dipity is web 2.0 completely, taking loads of information in different formats and shoving it together in an easy to follow timeline. Reminds me of those textbooks we had at school of timelines about the Tudors etc?

It’s not just journalists who could be using Dipity, charities and campaigning organisations can put an issue and its background in the spotlight and show what’s happened previously. I think the Students’ Union where I work will be hoping to use it to show the top-up fees debate, which will rear its head again in 2009 when the report is started into lifting the cap. Dipity could be fantastic at taking deep, and often political, issues and putting them into an easy to follow format. How else could it be used?

This is my first post as part of the Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blog ring over on journalism.co.uk. August’s topic is all about the challenges facing young journalists, so here goes:

The biggest challenge is… first the sheer amount of competition there now is in the media industry. I know it’s always been competitive, but with more and more universities offering journalism/media degrees the industry is full of ‘wannabe journalists’. This means that media organisations can keep their salaries nice and low, or in some cases not pay at all, and yet people will still bite at the chance to ‘have a go’. The turnover is high, the hours long, and I’m pretty sure for a recent graduate it’s demoralising stuff. I have friends who’ve gone in with high hopes, and been left nearly broke and their dreams shattered - or been stuck doing mundane work with little freedom.

As the economic slowdown begins to bite in the UK, and circulations continue to fall, the task of getting out on the beat and doing proper journalism is fast being ditched in favour of the story that will shift more papers there and then. The quick buck is often coming first. Going ‘off-diary’ is a luxury that few media organisations feel they can afford. For a young journalist, with ideas and drive, to be sat at a desk and faced with a pile of press releases and every ‘idea’ is shot down by more experienced colleagues must be a hell of a challenge in itself. As the recent departure of the BBC’s North-West political editor shows, the trend to ‘fluffy’ and ‘politics-lite’ reporting, is forcing many to consider their futures - and I’m sure there will be plenty of fresh meat willing to do ‘politics-lite’ reporting.

The challenge for many young journalist’s is having the confidence to stand up to an editor, or more senior colleague, and say ‘No, I think this is really important and I’ve got a great idea of how we can do more with this. We could do this on the web, we could do that on the web and cross-over to the paper/radio etc…’

Faced with negativity, cynicism and a lack of opportunities in traditioinal media organisations, it’s no wonder that so many talented journalist’s are jumping ship to public relations or other communications industries - where the budgets are bigger, the pay is better and the hours are more flexible.