LookupPage Blog | Professional Web Presence and Visibility

''Personal Branding" Search Up Significantly In 2009

With decision makers' looking up potential employees and business partners online as a standard practice, the significance of what a search query returns for a brand has increased through the years.

According to Google Trends more people are searching for the term "personal branding" than ever before. The rise is not only in search volume for the term but also in the amount of news references for "personal branding "online.

As a result of increased availability of the Internet in developing countries and the decline in the technology gap, more people and businesses are online. The internet has the capability of sparking a business relationship between companies that don't necessarily even speak the same language. This increases the importance of what each company will find online about the other.

Personal branding is an integral part of having an online presence; businesses are taking actions in order to establish both their online identity and brand. Searching these terms online is the first step.

Google Wave and You

Whether you’ve already heard a bit of buzz about Google Wave or haven’t yet noticed it online until now – either way, it’s bound to crop up again.

Focusing on real-time communication and online collaboration, Google Wave is poised to create seamless access to and organisation of our online world where multimedia content and real-time conversation is abundant (and will be even more so in the future).

How Can You Use Google Wave?

Officially launched by Google on May 27, 2009, the platform-crossing network is designed to simplify the vast amount of content and contacts of the average web user.

A convenient system for managing your social media profiles, the capabilities of Google Wave are tough to ignore. Here are some of the features and properties:

• Instant messaging
• Built with HTML 5, the latest in web programming
• Document storage and remote access
• Collaborative document editing (like Google Docs or Wikipedia)
• Drag and drop organisation
• Google/Wave name and profile
• Real-time search
• Automated translation between languages
• Switching between public and private conversations within the same thread
• Easy streaming of Twitter, RSS or other feeds
• Rich formatting and multimedia capabilities
• Archiving and recording (view past conversations, actions or waves)
• Elements of one’s Wave can be shared online, and thus indexable by search Engine spiders
• Promotes mashups through open source framework and API

What is a wave? A wave is a thread or conversation, which could be a Facebook interaction, email message, Twitter conversation or practically any other type of engagement.

While Google Wave may not be ready for the mainstream, it is a good hint at what’s to come in the world of multimedia communication and collaboration.

Register with Google Wave to receive more information and to see how you can use it with LookupPage to successfully maintain your online visibility.

Digg as a Social Media / Branding Platform

Social bookmarking, or the activity of highlighting and categorising interesting content for general consumption, has proved extremely popular, especially over the last few years.

Sites such as Digg can be very useful in finding information and even more convenient as a news feed or RSS feed. You are able to customise your favourite topics and enjoy relevant content in your chosen format, whether it be videos/images or written text.

While social bookmarking may still be a strange concept to many, the potential for social engagement and conversation is unavoidable. The communities on sites like Digg not only power the service, but are more active than you may think – sharing links across Twitter, Facebook and various other social media platforms.

The Social Digg Community

The Digg community is convenient when it comes to sharing and discussing links and stories with old friends, or even branching out and finding a new audience. Here are some ways to improve your diggability: 

• Add a Digg favicon to your blog template. This will allow readers to submit your blog or individual posts to Digg and share your content with their social circle and beyond.
• Add a link from your blog, website or LookupPage profile to your Digg profile. Digg have embeddable badges which make it easier for you to be contacted via Digg.
• View your friend’s activities and see how they choose to participate, not only in the Digg environment, but across the entirety of the web – this can be very handy when it comes to understanding your audience and broadening your perspective.
• Click and connect. Easily import your friends from your contact list on other platforms such as Gmail or Outlook, and invite your friends who aren’t yet on Digg.
• Comment on the submissions and listings of others, and spark up interesting conversation or debate to be noticed in the online arena.
• Create your profile with your Personal Branding guidelines in mind, and link between your current social media profiles. Technically, these outgoing links won’t be a vehicle for search engine spiders, but will allow you to be found and contacted easily between social media platforms.

Incentivising Your Marketing Using Twitter

Many people struggle to understand Twitter at first, while many others often don’t use the micro-blogging service to its full potential. Let’s take a look at how you can improve your Twitter impact with incentives and other great practices.

Be the Face

Firstly, it’s important to build credibility if you want to be taken seriously in any online marketing sphere. You can do this by portraying an image of professionalism but with a hint human personality – this trait is becoming common practice for marketers on the web.

Talk the Talk

Join in the conversation and engage. Industry commentary is important, but make sure your input is noticed. Keep your tweets in the appropriate format, use the right keywords and be Twitter-coherent (i.e. release full press releases in 140 character segments and you’ll be the laughing stock of the Internet).

Don’t Repeat Yourself, Be Quoted

Now that you have a bit of micro-blogging leverage with your credible image and complimenting tact, it’s time to get the platform and your followers to work for you.

If you hold competitions or polls, try to keep it relatively casual. Without detracting from the conversation, include the incentivised marketing tweet as part of the discussion rather than an interruption or distraction.

Get others to repeat your username or link by rewarding a limited number with prizes or freebies. This is easy to track, and will have your message (and more importantly your @username) spread far across the Twittersphere.

If prizes or physical incentives are a little out of your bracket, you can add incentives to your marketing messages by simply adding valuable information. Be it an interesting point to ponder, or a link to a multimedia resource such as a YouTube video or ‘how to’ PDF; you can create these resources yourself or simply sniff out the best of the bunch and share the link.

It’s all about getting your name out there. Try to include popular users by tagging them, or get their attention by retweeting one of their relevant messages. Offer an incentive to these popular Twitter users, and ‘piggy back’ on their audience. You’ll soon see your number of followers and/or traffic increasing.

FriendFeed Stats and FeedStats: A New Tool

 

What is FriendFeed? If you think it’s just another social networking site, think again. Those that have ever complained about the many popular social networking and media sites will be happy to know that FriendFeed consolidates these into one organised, legible and manageable feed.

Known as a social aggregator, FriendFeed has been online since 2007 and many users find it convenient to use instead of having to stay on top of multiple individual services such as Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds etc.

What Can You Learn From FeedStats?

FeedStats is a third party tool which allows you to analyse FriendFeed usage. Dynamic results are displayed in convenient graph form – simply insert your username (or your friend and competitors) and submit.

Between FriendFeed and FeedStats, there is much more opportunity for you to understand your personal identity and to learn more about your friends or competitors.

• Track how far your blog posts and tweets spread.
• Easily find new contacts with which to interact.
• Keep an eye out for new social media or networking sites used by your friends.
• View all comments on your posts in one location.
• View at which times and days users post more.
• See which users you are most compatible with and which users comment on your posts most.
• See which interfaces you, your competitors and friends use most.
• Compare your reach (number of contacts etc.) with that of your competitors.