Daniel Eizans: Content Strategist, Geek

How do you keep up with all of those different Web sites, and how do I build a web presence? It’s a question I often hear from friends, students and clients. I always respond to it the same way – Are you sure you want to be as transparent and public as I am? If the answer is yes, here’s my brief how-to on the best ways to stop being invisible online, through careful building of your personal brand and web presence.

Perhaps the most obvious would be to start snagging up your name on the popular social networking sites. If your exact name is available, get it. But if it’s not, I’ve found it helpful to stick to a similar user name or URL shortcode for EVERY service you use. Consistency is something search engines love. The more properties that you can duplicate your username or URL shortcode on, the easier you are to find. And if your last name isn’t quite as unique as “Eizans,” do the best you can to do a first last combo or a username that at least applies to you in some way. You’ll find that most of my property on the web is full first, full last (danieleizans).

Five sites you absolutely shouldn’t ignore include Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and last, but certainly not the least important is building your own website on your own domain. Here’s a quick rundown on why these five things are important to being more visible on the web.

Personal Domain/Website: If your name is available as a dot com, grab it now! With your own web site, you can point it towards all of these other great properties and build your blog into it. If your name isn’t available, do your best to figure out something memorable that applies to you. Don’t get cute, unless you have a company that is tied to your name.

Once you begin adding content to the site, you’ll begin to rise in the search engine rankings, so long as your content is optimized correctly, have strong title tags, header information and include links in the body copy.

Building clean and optimized content is a whole other post I’ll probably get to later.

LinkedIn: If used correctly, your LinkedIn profile says everything about your professional reputation. It essentially serves as your amendable online resume, complete with instant access to your professional references. It’s also plugged in to job hunting tools and is highly functional and SEO friendly.

Since spending a good deal of time updating my resume, background and ACTIVELY asking for recommendations, I’ve gotten at least 1 to 2 job leads a week from my LinkedIn profile. Don’t settle for just listing the job title, fill out the descriptions. Sell yourself.

Flickr: If you have any skill with a camera, Flickr can be a great way to house your photos, tag them, optimize them and be sure they are providing traffic back to your web site. I use Flickr exclusively for all of my images on Diary of a Would-Be Chef and for a great deal of content that I’ve personally shot for this web site. It features an analytics suite that’s reasonably good at identifying where your traffic is coming from and if you choose to make your photos sharable and usable by other bloggers, you could get even more traffic back to your site depending on the publishing rights package you go with.

Several of my food photos are being used as stock art for other blogs, in blog headers and in recipe reprints. In exchange for that use, I require the blogger publishes my name and links directly back to my personal web site, and believe me, I get traffic from it. Flickr also allows you to add links to comments and HTML. Also, take advantage of tags and create one for your site that you’re using the photos on.

Facebook: This social networking giant is a bit of a no-brainer. But, in order to display your profile in the Google results, you will need to change your privacy settings. Sharing your other sites and just having your name attached to Facebook helps you to be more visible.

Twitter: Claim your username on Twitter (before someone else does) and make your bio about you, not just what you’re interested in. Admittedly, Twitter isn’t for everyone. It takes work to stay on top of who you follow and the topics you’re interested in. But having your username locked down isn’t a bad thing. And if you’re as busy as I am at times, you may find it much easier to provide quick updates through micro-blogging as opposed to taking the time to research and post a longer piece. At any rate, Twitter is growing like gangbusters right now and you should become acclimated with it sooner than later. Being on Twitter will only help your name get out there.

So that’s it. Those are the bare bones you need to get started. As you get those properties going, you can add others, like FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc., etc. Crawling out of the cave of invisibility isn’t terribly difficult, but it does take time and a real effort. Also, don’t forget that once you’re out, it’s impossible to crawl back in. So before you go crazy, make sure you don’t mind being found with a single keyword or two. You may regret it in the long run.

Photo Jonathan Phillip

This morning I was following more than 900 people, and even with Tweetdeck, I decided that it was just information overload. I had to narrow my scope and damn the gushing stream of information, only allowing relevant (to my newly intended purpose) tweets to trickle through.

A few posts back, I wrote about how I converse on Twitter. Even since that posting, I’ve changed how I use it.

Why the change? I’m simply missing information I believe I NEED to receive. I may WANT to follow everyone who follows me back, or follow a ton of brands to dig up information on new products; but the fact of the matter is, I don’t NEED all of the information I’ve been getting.

So, how does this happen? How does someone get overwhelmed by Twitter? My answer would be that it happens differently for different users, depending on what they’re using Twitter for.

Personally, I’ve now resolved to use Twitter for three things:

1. To keep tabs on friends and co-workers, discussing like interests and projects with them
2. To monitor the automotive industry, automotive enthusiasts and brands I have a particular interest in
3. To monitor trends in social media and content marketing

Somewhere along the line I got clumsy, and greedy. I followed far too many people and invested follows in folks who didn’t contribute anything that I could offer a point of view on. And I was getting so much data, that I’d consistently miss conversations I should have been a part of. I believe I was getting too focused on improving my Twitter Grade, and forgot about what I began using Twitter for in the first place – to take part in conversations about the things I’m interested in.

The real goal is to keep information relevant and interesting to those that are following me. Sure, the three different audiences may get tired of the odd combination of tweets I provide, but that’s the beauty of social networking. We get exposed to some things we otherwise may not have ever known about. Because of this, I’ve hung onto people who share my other interests, which include racing, outdoor activities, hockey and green living. I didn’t want to give up those occasional things that broadened my horizons on these topics.

I’ve managed to pare my follow list to 729, and vow not to breach 750 (still a sizable list!). In that process, I did end up removing people who were still following me. This was a difficult thing for me to do, but when it comes right down to it, I caught myself following people and brands I had absolutely no interest in. Not to mention, my Twitter use is not singularly focused on one client, product or the agency I work for. If I were tweeting with a singular focus I’d probably follow everyone back, attempting to engage those folks in conversation about the brand they followed in the first place.

I like that I’m leaner, and if I unfollowed you or don’t follow you back, I hope you don’t take offense. I’m simply trying to make Twitter’s valuable information stream work for and with me. Open to thoughts and comments. Fire away!

Photo: Michelle Kwajafa

Back in October, Joe Jaffe (@jaffeejuice) wrote a case study for the US Postal Service’s Deliver Magazine. In the study he discusses a trend he sees coming by 2012 – the development of the “Chief Conversation Officer.”

Jaffe says the Chief Conversation Officer will replace the traditional Chief Marketing Officer, serving as the true conduit between corporation and consumer. These new executives will essentially bring all customer conversations under one roof. They’ll be able to bridge the gap between public relations and consumer outreach, creating true integration and conversation about the brand.

I believe that that time is coming much sooner than 2012 for some companies as some have already started to adopt some of the roles of the Chief Conversation Officer.

Take the Michigan based Biggby Coffee as a great example of a company already putting this into practice. The company’s CEO Robert Fish (@BiggbyBob), is an active Twitter user, blogger and advocate for his brand.

I know what you’re thinking. Every CEO is a brand advocate. But not every CEO takes the time to engage with consumers, bring their consumers into product focus groups and do his or her own PR. What Bob Fish does well is have actual conversations with the people who consume his coffee. He’s friendly, honest and above all, engaging.

He’s also very open to rewarding those who are considering his brand. Fish entices fringe adopters by encouraging them to get in discussions with others who drink Biggby Coffee, without alienating those who are already true Biggby believers. This fantastic fan base is a true army of brand loyalists who act as evangelists for the brand. And in today’s challenging business climate, when loyalty is a fleeting thing, Biggby is committed to conversations with its consumers. Biggby isn’t just monitoring what its customers are saying effective response and responsiveness. As Jaffe writes in his book, and as Biggby has put into practice, “every customer complaint, compliment, question or concern deserves and mandates our time, our effort, our investment.”

In 2009, as more companies take the plunge into social media, I’m sure we’ll see more brands start to take these sorts of steps. We can only hope they don’t use these tools as another means to simply shout their message. It’s not another tool for companies to use, it’s about conversations. What other companies do you know of that are already using Chief Conversation Officers? Comments appreciated.

Photo by: Nara Vieira da Silva Osga

When I talk to co-workers and clients, I’m often asked how I can bear to follow so many people and still feel like I’m part of discussions on Twitter. My answer is a simple one. I take part in the discussions I believe I can add relevance to or ask questions when I have a genuine interest in a topic or particular Tweet. I treat Twitter as if I’m at a huge dinner party filled with really intelligent guests. I add something to the conversation when I believe I can say something relevant, helpful or offer my opinion when it’s asked of me.

Ironically, while doing research for this post, I found out Chris Brogan used a Cocktail Party as his analogy when he discussed how he uses Twitter. It’s a great post!

As of this post (Jan. 15, 2009) I’m following 900 people and being followed by more than 650 people. It’s not easy to keep up with all 900 people I follow. For most users I’d imagine Twitter, is the chance to engage with people who have their similar interests in mind or with people in their vicinity. For me, Twitter has become an integral part of my day, a research tool and a method of communication.

The long and short of it is that I DON’T participate in every conversation. I DO go back and use Twitter Search to find topics I’m concerned about and follow up on them with vigor. As an advertising and marketing professional, I spend a lot of time following the competition of my clients, discussing my client’s service or product and using my feed as a PR vehicle for those products or services. That being said, I also use my Twitter feed as an opportunity to be myself and to discuss issues I’m interested in. I don’t believe in maintaining a separate feed for my “work” activity. I’m always working and usually let my personality seep into my work and my work relationships (perhaps to a fault?).

Sure, as someone who’s main client is Chevrolet, I spend a lot of time reading Tweets from Auto Blogs, newspapers, industry buffs and gearheads, but I’m also a passionate Geek who loves film, technology, iPhone applications, philosophy, politics and sports. I believe that as social media practitioners we have a responsibility to be ourselves. We can’t tell a brand to be authentic and transparent without being authentic and transparent when we’re doing the telling. We really need to drink our own Kool-Aid more often than not.

I personally don’t use any desktop apps to manage my feed. I check updates occasionally when I’m away from my computer at work through Twitteriffic on my iPhone, but if I miss some things I don’t panic. I take it in stride that I can’t be involved in every discussion that I’d like to be in and that I can’t be part of all the action. I react and respond to what I can. With the number of followers I have at the moment, I can still make time to respond to ever Direct Message (I get about 10 a day), and still respond to every “@.” However, I can’t respond to every request for a poll, can’t read every blog post tweeted by a user I follow whose opinion I genuinely value, and can’t stay up 24-hours a day to keep up on the feed. I do what I can, stay as transparent as possible and make sure I’m a part of the conversations I believe I NEED to be a part of – which usually equals 20-30 tweets a day on the average (more in cases I’m at events like #NAIAS – 34 tweets in 4 hours).

I imagine if I pop well over the 1,000 following mark, I’ll need to start using something like TweetDeck to keep up and keep things organized, but for now, I’m happy with the way I’m using Twitter.

Sidenote: @Eyecube has an amazing post today on the politics of corporate social media transparency with lots of great discussions in the comments.

The short and quick answer to the question posed above is yes. There is no digitally based service that provides a better forum for quickly reporting and analyzing a situation based on the opportunity for a community to collectively report on a situation. But if you want a more detailed case for this argument, keep on reading…

I spent the bulk of my day today at the North American International Auto Show. In the process I became a reporter again. It was far from my first time at Detroit’s annual auto extravaganza as a member of the media, but it was the first time I’ve been to the show armed with so many devices, my iPhone and an array of social networking services that are followed by a reasonably sizable audience.

What happened was pretty inspiring. My coverage of the show Tuesday was truly a collaborative effort – an exercise in citizen journalism. During the course of the day, I had conversations about vehicles and the show with PR professionals (Scott Monty), Bloggers (Andrew Mrozinski at RideStory), Gearheads and interested non-auto professionals (Shelli Gutholm), both via Twitter and in real-time.

For the first time in quite a while, I was a journalist again. I snapped photos, shot video and immediately began transmitting short snippets and thoughts about the show via my Twitter feed, launching into conversations with fellow journalists, PR folks and gearheads. After my initial tweets began, I began talking about NAIAS with journalists and enthusiasts who couldn’t attend and was able to provide several of them with photos and information that they wanted to see on specific models. The photo below, for example, was requested by a Ford fan in Austin.

In short, the community at large shaped my story and the way I approached this year’s show. I didn’t explore and tweet about the show in the way I would have covered it. Instead, the tweets and brightkite posts I made were made about certain the vehicles were shaped by my audience.

What Twitter and microblogging services are providing us is a true citizen form of journalism, albeit a bit underutilized. Twitter needs to evolve to be a place where people go to for news other than just widely-discussed events like the North American International Auto Show. It’s here that traditional media outlets like @CNN, @FoxNews and @NYTimes have a real chance at involving their audience in the coverage of events and integrating it into all forms of media – print, digital and otherwise.

We need only look back to the attacks on Mumbai to see the true power of Twitter’s citizen journalism potential. According to New York Times research, at the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter. But the traditional media outlets should create feeds of these tweets and help decipher, map and weave them into lengthier stories and microsites on their own Web sites to create a richer story. When the big media outlets truly empower the citizen reporter and make sense of the micro-blogosphere, truly powerful results can occur. Blogs have been doing this via commenting for years, but traditional media outlets have the unique perspective to use their credibility to empower truly passionate citizens. This is how newspapers in general began. It’s high time they returned to empowering the community and citizens that they serve.

What do you think? What’s standing in the way of Twitter becoming a truly amazing experiment in citizen journalism?