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

Really liking the ‘Best of 2008′ that Last FM have just released. It feels like a magazine when you click onto it, apart from instead of someone, somewhere, deciding what is the best single of the year - it’s the listeners.

I like the layout. I like the idea. And it’s interesting that Last FM is creating editorial content through its users. There’s a biog for each act, almost verging on comment in places, and then there’s some multimedia content with videos of the acts. And to be able to listen to the ‘Best of 2008′ radio - excellent.

What could the third sector learn from this? Creating a presence for the ‘end of year’ is a desirable thing. List your achievements, show off what you’ve done and after all everyone loves an end of year list.

Gave a presentation to AMSU (Association of Managers in Students’ Union) North-West meeting this afternoon about what’s nearly been a year journey for our development of the web presences at UCLan Students’ Union.

It was a great chance to reflect on how far we’ve come, particularly in the last six months, and to take stock of some of the big changes that have happened as a result of our new website and approach to the web and social media.

The presentation was only a few slides long but there was plenty of discussion about how Union’s can use the web, and in particular how they can engage the membership through the web. Hence some discussions about online voting, the use of Ning as an issue based social network and the collection of members data to communicate messages properly.

It was useful to show what we’d been doing and hear that others wanted to follow suit, but needed to have a real think through what they wanted to do with their web presences. We also talked about what we’d got planned for the next six months and it looks promising.

I didn’t make it down South for the #nfptweetup but it seemed like it went really well. You could contribute a slide in advance for discussion by those at the event (apparently over 30 people showed up) about how twitter can be used, examples.

Mine was ‘What is twitter’ overkill and who in an organisation should be doing the tweeting. On the twitter overkill questioned it seemed that if you’re not interesting when you tweet then anything is overkill, but if you are interesting then tweet away to your heart’s content.

Below is the slideshow of crowdsourced slides for the event, experiences of using twitter, questions and examples:

Congratulations to Rachel Beer for organising the event, it was a cool experience to be ‘tweeting from the sidelines’ as the discussions unfolded.

There’s a couple of great posts from Chris Brogan about using twitter and where to start in the world of social media, with some useful tips for charities.

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

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.

squidoo logo, thanks to teamstickergiant for the image

I got pointed to something interesting today while reading about search enginge optomisation (seo), thanks to Tim Buchalka and takeoverpageone for their awesome advice about seo.

That interesting thing was Squidoo. It’s a really simple and easy way to collect everything about yourself in a simple to setup web page - and best of all it ranks really well in Google because of the ‘link juice’.

So I clicked the setup link and set up a page about myself. It took about five minutes in all (had to log in about three times which was annoying). I had to type in a brief description for my page, then write about msyelf a little bit - writing about yourself is always really difficult. You don’t want to sound like an idiot, but at the same time you don’t want to NOT saying anything about yourself. Squidoo has a little piece of text underneath the box you are writing in and it tells you if what you’ve written is good, and gives you ‘cmon’s to do more. That’s great, it’s like having a writing coach.

I added my basic modules and published my page. I was able to important the RSS feed of my latest blog entries, so this entry will be appearing shortly on my squidoo page. This is good as it gives me some link juice everytime I post an entry.

I’ve also added a text module and listed all my social media presences into it, from twitter to delicious. The plan is that when someone puts ‘edwalker’ into google, then hopefully find my presences really high up. It’s not easy as I have a very generic sounding name, but I’m determined to become a leading blogger and get myself right up there.

I’ll give it a month, and see if squidoo can make a difference.

I’ve also created a Squidoo for the organisation that I work for.

Do you Squidoo? What do you think of it? Any advice?