On Being John Welsh: why you need to change your social media identity to remain authentic

I’ve done it. I’ve changed the design of my blog. Out has gone the masthead that has loyally followed me for the first tempestuous 11 months in the blogosphere. And in comes a new one by Claudia Moeller (who Tweets @ludg8cre8ive).

Why did I do it? 

I loved my original social media identity, used on my blog’s masthead (above) and as an avatar. The photograph that I used was taken during UBM Live’s first ever Digital Achievement Day.  I got a call to go down to another floor of our office and everyone (I mean everyone!) was wearing a paper mask of my face. I am the digital director so it showed that “we are all digital now”.

Very On Being John Malkovich.

I loved that photo. My reason for plunging into the social web in the first place was to find out what our company needed to know and work with my colleagues to make the social web fun and profitable. The photo made me feel that my colleagues were holding my hand in what was, at first a pretty, lonely place.

Then a month ago, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was the first time I had had the opportunity to transform many online relationships into face-to-face. One of the people I met up with was Hollis Thomases (who Tweets @hollisthomases) who just could not see the similarity between my social media identity and myself in person. Peter Kim has recently given this phenomenon a name and a definition:

Headfake, noun.  A situation in which you are familiar with a person’s avatar picture, which gives you an inaccurate idea of how that person appears in real life.

Luckily Hollis grabbed her iPhone, took a picture and my new social media identity was formed. My social media avatars now look like me and, finally, so does the masthead of this blog.

The strange this is, I should have worked this out for myself. I have spent 14 years as an editor of three different B2B magazines. Each one bore a photo of myself as editor. Every time I attended an industry event people would come up and start speaking as if they had known me for years. In a way, they did know me. For, just like social media, the repetition of my photo and my weekly or monthly leader plus personable, if not personal, words made them own a little of me. 

So why should you change your design? Not because it might attract more readers (they probably read you in RSS). Certainly not for vanity. But for what we are all looking for on the social web – authenticity.

I must just make sure I do not have a haircut anytime soon.

JEEcamp 2009: Interview with Paul Bradshaw – on the future of journalism

Paul Bradshaw, JEEcamp organiser, has strong views on journalism’s future.

People will not pay for content but only a platform, he argues, so journalists should create their content around services. Hear what he has to say in a short interview outside the event. See pictures from the event here.

If your reader does not let you see the video, click on this link to access the post and see the video.

Paul Tweets @paulbradshaw and writes the Online Journalism Blog.

JEEcamp 2009: pictures from the event

For coverage of the event go Martin Belam here or here, Michael Haddon here and Kasper Sorensen here.  But for those wanting pictures, my photos are in a slideshow below and can be found in a Flick set here. And finally here are Jemimah Knight’s photos of the event.  

JEEcamp 2009: Interview with Martin Belam – on the future of journalism

I was in Birmingham yesterday for JEEcamp. It’s a great opportunity to talk about journalism and, more specifically, how to make money from it.

I met Martin Belam and asked him his views. I’ve always been a great fan – I put him in my list of UK bloggers and Twitterers who are beginning to rival their US peers for my attention. Listen to what he had to say.

Martin Tweets @currybet and blogs at Currybet and MediaGuardian.

How do you celebrate digital progress in your workplace?

Last week saw our second, annual Digital Achievement Day – a moment when everyone across the company celebrates the change in our culture as we move from a traditional to a new media company.

The day started with balloons on every desk and kicked off with a CEO’s breakfast Tweetup (invitations by Twitter, of course!). It then moved on to lunchtime workshops and finished with drinks and prize giving. In between, parts of the company organised anything from daylong digital strategy sessions to online competitions. We even used a hashtag.

Here’s what Matt Parsons, one of my colleagues, thought of the event.

Digital Achievement Day is a bit of fun really. But the serious side is this. Everyone knows how far we have come on our digital journey and how far we have to go. So, just once in a while, stop for a moment and recognise the distance travelled.

How do you celebrate digital progress in your workplace?