Being Seen in All the Right Places

To get the word out about your brand, you want to make sure you’re seen in all the right places. Of course this means adding your online presence on Facebook and Twitter, current popular favorites, but history suggests these sites won’t stay popular forever. Where else should you focus your efforts?

Change is the only thing we can depend on when it comes to online communication, particularly social networks. Your best approach is to become an early adopter of as many sites as possible without sacrificing too much of your time.

Being seen in the right places, then, is often a time-management issue. In Chapter 11, I explain more about time management on social media networks, but for now just know that there are strategies for keeping up your productivity as you engage on social networks. You really can engage successfully online and keep your “day” job!

The World Wide Web seemingly bursts at the seams with new social networks, new sites, and new profiles, so it’s easy to overlook some lesser-known players. In this section, I cover the most popular (and promising) sites for you to explore, and explain why it’s important for you to claim your brand on networks you may have never even heard of.

Here are some great reasons for you to claim your personal or brand name in as many places as possible:

It prevents squatters from taking advantage of you. Squatters are people who claim web domains, social profile names, and social network business pages even though they have no relationship to the name or brand. They do this in hopes of making lots of money by basically holding the site hostage until somebody pays them enough money to transfer ownership. Establishing your brand presence on a network removes this threat.

It minimizes name confusion. This is only going to get more confusing as more people engage online. David Meerman Scott, marketing guru and PR thought leader, used to go by “David Scott,” but discovered that in search results his name got lost among the other David Scotts in the world. Adding his middle name helped make him unique and thus eliminated confusion.

It prevents people from using fake profiles to pose as you. Celebrities and politicians deal with this all the time: Pranksters hijack their names to pull jokes or to make inappropriate comments. You never know when you or your brand could end up becoming a public figure for at least a limited period of time. Claiming your name as widely as possible protects you from unnecessary embarrassment.

It improves your rank on search engines. There’s nothing like having lots of terrific information about you “above the fold” in a search engine’s results.

Diving in to popular communities

There are more online social networks than you probably ever want to know about, and new ones pop up almost every day. To stay on top of things, you don’t need to exhaustively seek out every new site, but you do need to keep your ears open. New sites that people are genuinely excited about and engaged in create a lot of buzz (versus hype). You can spot the difference almost immediately: A promising new network feels energizing, while others feel forced.

Trust your instincts and spend the majority of your time in the networks that feel right for you and your target audiences. Visit the less effective ones only periodically. In Chapter 8, I share tips and tricks on how to keep up your social media strategy without losing sleep.

The following list offers a few places to consider claiming your brand online:

Your domain name(s): YourName.com, YourName.net, and YourName.tv are all good starts.

Google+: It’s the fastest growing social network in history, reaching more than 25 million users in its first month. It’s projected to reach 400 million users by the end of 2012. Google+ also will map into everything Google does, including Google Places.

Figure 9-3 shows my Google+ profile. Note the About tab in the center area. You can customize this tab extensively with links and a lot of creativity.

Facebook: Hot contender for search dominance online. According to Alexa.com, in some weeks Facebook searches have outnumbered Google’s.

Twitter: Its unique link-sharing culture helps you to promote your brand to a large audience as long as you’re willing to retweet interesting, helpful, or entertaining info from others.

LinkedIn: This is the best place to develop your professional contacts and to reinforce your reputation by sharing achievements, recommendations, and more about your education and professional experience.

Pinterest: Fun place to create virtual bulletin boards where you share your interests. Linking pictures on Pinterest to pictures on your blog is a great way to improve your search engine results.

Tumblr: This informal blogging service pulls together WordPress-style publishing power with awesome Twitter integration. Great place to share images.

YouTube: It’s the largest video-sharing site on the Internet. Because YouTube is owned by Google, the site is integrated into everything Google (although the search algorithm is completely different), which means it’s great for your SEO (as long as it’s you posting the videos under your name) and a must-do for your reputation online.

StumbleUpon: Social sharing site that gives you the ultimate site-hopping experience, all geared toward your preferences. As you share your favorite posts, people learn more about you and your brand via your profile.

Slideshare: Uploading slide show presentations was never so cool or viral. Slideshare has 500 percent more traffic from business owners than any other professional website.

If your brand is confined to a city (if you’re managing online reputation management for a restaurant, for example), by all means establish yourself on a geolocation service such as Google Places. I show you more about geolocation services and how to use them to your advantage in Chapter 17.

Great list resources for more networks

Another way to seek out networks is by using an automated service. Just paste in your profile information. The following sites automatically search for your name or brand in a great number of sites and social networks (so that you can find out where your name is taken or available). In addition, these services can help you set up accounts on any of these sites:

Namechk (www.namechk.com ): Complimentary service scans 160 social sites for your name, brand name, or vanity URL in less than a minute.

KnowEm (www.knowem.com ): Another free service, though it searches 590 sites and offers paid packages if you want them to automate your profile creation. (See Figure 9-4.) It’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and on Fox News, CNN, cnet, TechCrunch, and Mashable.

Copying and pasting your profile information takes only a minute, though you will probably have to resize your image more than once to fulfill the guideline requirements of certain networks.

Both of these sites have received good reviews, but neither worked for me as advertised. I suggest using them to check to see if your personal name, brand name, product, or service name is available on social and bookmarking networks — but sign up for each site manually so that you can be sure it’s done correctly.

I really prefer to set up accounts manually because you get to fully customize them and take a moment to check out the community while you’re there. You may find your target market there and be glad you discovered it.

Consider marking your calendar with periodic reminders to check for new networks every couple of months. I cover this more in Chapter 17, where you learn how to save time and energy with your social media engagement.