Social Media - Time to reflect on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogging and everything else it play in my life?

Not long ago I realised that I in the new world, work and family, "Brand Me" was becoming more important. I heard loads of people talking about Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogging, etc. At that point I had not really embraced any of these.

Two things, maybe three things, triggered me to do something. I am not sure of the order, but one was reading an ebook on self-branding that pointed out that no matter what one though one had a presence, an image in the digital online world, from emails, news items, other people posting pictures etc. By and large anything that has been produced on the internet is still available somewhere so someone and much that was not produced in the internet is being converted eg old school photographs. The point that was made was one can embrace it, be positive and contribute content you want to be available, thereby endeavouring to keep that overall impression positive or one can just let it go and not know what a google search will bring up.

The second was the fact that my wife and daughter had "got into" Facebook and kept asking me questions about how to do things; questions to which I did not have answers. This was something of a first in the technology/internet world.

The last was the convergence of two developments, a) the purchase of an iPad and thus more instant and easy access to the online world (ie no heavy laptop or long boot up delays) and b) a decision to work on my written skills. I don't think these are bad, in fact compared with many project managers I encounter they are positively advanced, but the written word has always been the least of my skills and I wanted to improve where I could.


So.........I took action. I already had a Linkedin account so I took the brand "IanJSutherland" as domains (.com and .co.uk). I also took Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. I decided to blog using Blogger (ie here) though I did not feel I had a "Brand Ian" that warranted blogging, instead I used the moniker "tales of an active mind" and took the twitter account "theactivemind" to link with it. Later I started my own limited company for when I was contracting in the name Kellian and took out similar accounts.

Now is time for reflection on what I have found works, what doesn't, what I see in my wife and daughter's usage and maybe some of the potential.

So what works for me? Well undoubtedly for professional networking Linkedin works and is my primary tool. Others have offered membership eg Plaxo and Talent.me. In many cases I have taken an account, but cannot honestly remember the last time I accessed them let alone found them useful. By contrast I use Linkedin every day and the evidence of leads coming my way is that others use Linkedin too. My approach is to keep it "professional, but with personality". What I mean by "with personality" is that I do post things that I find interesting and think will interest others using the status (that includes some blog posts). I also use the additional tools to keep a reading list up to date, etc , etc.

I use Facebook now, but this is very much a "personal" tool that keeps me connected to three primary groups; old school and college friends, my golf group and, of course, family. Interestingly my daughter refuses to let me connect on Facebook - it is so uncool to be connected with your father, or so it seems. On face book I can be the proud father, poor golfer or just a friend.

By contrast, while I still have the MySpace account ( I just checked ), but have not done anything with it and not felt the need. It seems that Myspace is about self-promotion and maybe the fact that I use Linkedin so much means that MySpace is redundant for me. At least having the account means that no one else does and thus won't damage the brand.

I have Twitter. Well, in fact I have a number of Twitter feeds and I do use some of them though maybe not in the same way others do. I have linked mine to this blog, Linkedin, to my websites and indeed to each other. In practice I generally use Twitter to "advertise" a blog. The limited text capacity and pure uncontrolled broadcast nature of it makes it hard to develop and idea or create any dialogue. I do "follow" a few names and occasionally find something interest, but it is not compulsive viewing.

My daughter is a Twitter fan, both tweeting and following others, friends and celebrities. I guess with enough friends tweeting there could come a critical mass that might make me track it, but that may be for the younger generation. Interestingly is the intimacy and directness (ie straight to the reader personally) of the celebrity posts that seems to hook her, When "Alan" ie Alan Sugar, or "Piers" ie Piers Morgan tweet (or at least one of their minions does) she reacts as if it was a personal communication.


So if Linkedin and Facebook are "Yes" and MySpace is a "No" then Twitter is "OK'ish".

The one that has caught me is the blogging, as evidence here. I find it energising, cathartic, not as hard as I thought and I keep coming back. It probably helps that I set the blog up to be an eclectic collection as it allows me to go as I wish. There is a general theme of "change" and managing change, but any review will show a mixed set of topics. For me I would make blogging a "Yes" too.

It would be easy to argue that blogging is self-indulgent and to an extent I would certainly agree, but as an arena to home ones skills and make new connections it has huge potential. Shown below are the tracking stats (excluding my own accesses) for my blog since I started in mid-2009. They have not been startling, though the recent lift has been. Even this month, January, I am expecting over 1,000 visits (it stands at 582 on the 16th of the month)




Even more intriguing to me is the origin of these visitors. The top countries in the all-time list are shown below. Outside the UK and US the numbers are modest but significant and there is a long tail of smaller records. This week has seen visitors from Nepal, Denmark, Ireland, Cayman Island, Oman and Singapore. When before would someone like me reach such wide audience?

United States 3,643

United Kingdom 1,824

India 75

Canada 68

Singapore 67

Netherlands 63

Germany 59

South Korea 50

Russia 44

Australia 36

Before closing, it is probably worth picking up on two other social media tools that have caught my eye.

The first is WhatsApp a cross platform messenger for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Nokia. My wife has a group of golfing ladies, many of who travel and they have all picked up WhatsApp. It is very common for them to be spread across two or three continents, upwards to half a dozen locations, yet all be communicating with ease, near real time using WhatsApp. As long as they have internet access, preferably via WiFi then it is all free too. This seems to be the way forward in the messenger space. Certainly if Blackberry's demise is to be believed and Apple keep their platforms heavily protected, then WhatsApp seems to be well positioned.

The other I will mention is Yammer. This is like Twitter for companies. It allows you to set membership criteria (usually via email address) before someone can join a Yammer set. There after it works much like Twitter in that one broadcasts a short message and those who have elected to follow you will see it. I feel there is a role for something like this in companies and probably in change endeavours and that the more protected nature of Yammer makes it better suited. In truth this is largely a feeling for me right now and I have not yet crystallised how and where I would use it in anger.