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.

Interview with Tony Uphoff – on using Facebook and Twitter to network at events

Tony Uphoff runs UBM’s TechWeb (a sister company to my own) which runs Information Week and the Web 2.0 Expo co-produced with O’Reilly Media.

Tony is very active in social media with a blog Uphoff on Media and a Twitter. Here he talks about how he uses Facebook and Twitter to network before and during business-to-business events.

This is my sixth and last interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and my second interview with Tony.

Seven tips for getting the most out of an Event 2.0

I’ve just returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Before I left, I exploited my existing social media activity. I did not approach any potential contacts directly but used social media in what I called the etiquette of permission networking.

I got my digital kit ready for the Web 2.0 Expo: I would use Twitter for networking and microblogging; I also intended to shoot several short interviews on a Flip camera.

Web 2.0 Expo is an impressive four day event of workshops, lectures, networking and an exhibition (disclosure: the event is co-produced by a sister company of my own). What struck me most, however, was the wall of social media that surrounded the event at all time.

Whether it was projected Twitter feeds, such as #smfail for a session with Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim and Charlene Li, or Nancy Duarte’s use of Meebo’s Brainstorm, the conference not only preached social media. It lived it.

You might start out with 300 people in one room all linked to each other through their laptops or mobile devices. But, as the session progressed, we were joined by hundreds then thousands of others from across the world who followed and then interacted with the Twitter feed. 

So, how did I do? Was my permission-based approach to networking effective? Was my digital kit the right approach?

1. Permission networking rocks. Every single person who approached me for a meetup, showed up.
2. Online networking can never replace face-to-face contact. The most intense moments were when I met people I had only known online. 
3. Be ready for people’s assumptions about you. Listen to their view of what is the difference between your online and your real identities. If they make sense, integrate them into your social media profile. For example, I’ve changed the photo on some of my profiles since people said I did not look like my picture.
4. Video posts are not a time-saving device. Uploading the videos onto Vimeo always took longer than I thought. The checking and double-checking of headlines and links was as intense as for a written post.
5. Do not let “cabin fever” during a conference influence your media strategy. As the week went on, my subscriptions declined dramatically. I use Feedburner so I am used to dramatic ups and downs but I began to think my subscribers hated what I was doing. I stuck to my guns and my subscribers returned to normal.
6. Remember to disable existing feeds if you change kit and platform. I forgot to disable an earlier process for video interviews on my blog that I had set up six months ago.  So, one morning, I was alarmed to have sent out three Tweets with links to my Vodpod (video host) profile. It looked and felt like spam and was entirely my fault and oversight.
7. Do some traditional note taking. Most delegates spend every session with their heads over a laptop, interacting with the speakers online. It is very addictive. But you are far less likely to walk out with decent notes or even listen properly. So, just occasionally, close down the laptop, shut off the mobile device, ignore the Twitter feed and open a notebook instead.

Interview with Paul Way – the impact of Facebook and Twitter on mainstream businesses

Paul Way and I used to work together in London before he moved back to the US to work for sister company UBM TechInsights.

I met up with him for breakfast in San Francisco’s Dottie’s True Blue cafe where he reminded me just how good he was at seeing the bigger picture. Here he evaluates what impact the lack of business plans by Facebook or Twitter has on mainstream businesses. Listen to his interview.

 

This is my fifth interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Interview with David Cohn – the future of investigative journalism

David Cohn’s Spot.us is an experiment “to preserve investigative journalism” in the San Francisco bay area. 

This is how it works. Members of the public choose which topic should be investigated by a journalist, pledging anything from $5 upwards. 

Listen to how David sees his idea taking off and his plea that journalism will only survive if others are as experimental. 

David’s Twitter handle is @Digidave, here are his Shares, which I have written about before, and he writes a blog DigiDave.

This is my fourth interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Interview with Peter Kim – what’s next?

Peter Kim, blogger, Twitterer and social media expert, faced my Flip next.

He had picked up that I was coming to San Francisco following my post on the etiquette of permission networking. He commented, suggesting we meet up. Listen to his take on where social media is going next. And traditional business cards!

 

This is my fourth interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Interview with Cece Salomon-Lee – virtual experience to become more dominant online

I’m an avid reader of Cece Salomon-Lee’s PR Meets Marketing blog. Recently she has been exploring video, particularly for expressing her story. It’s good.

Listen to how Cece uses Twitter to network at events and how she sees the virtual experience becoming more and more dominant online.

Cece is also the marketing director of InXpo and has both a personal and professional Twitter. She is my third interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Interview with Carlos Hernandez – on the social capital of social media

Carlos Hernandez does something I had not heard of before. He trains unemployed baby boomers to find work through social media.

Listen to what he had to say about the role of social media for good in society and what Carlos said to Twitter’s Evan Williams.

I really like Carlos’ approach to social media. The early web was an egalitarian place where all were equal and most things were shared. And then the big corporations came along and changed things.

Could social media, the great leveller, play a similar role? Will it survive its rapid absorption into the mainstream?

This is my first interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

I’ve got my digital kit ready for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (plus shades!)

I will be travelling to or arrived in San Francisco when you read this, on my way to the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco. I’m really excited.

Several leading and up-and-coming social media experts have arranged to meet me. I wrote in an earlier post that I was going to use permission rather than assertive networking – that is only approach people if they made it clear they wanted to network. It has worked better than you could imagine.

So I’ll try and video, photo and record as many of the important ideas that they mention. So I’ve taken my digital kit with me.

When I was a traditional editor, I would have taken the lot to report with them ie broadcast from the event.

Today my goals are quite different. They are

• to use the kit for networking, 
• to test myself as I try to make all the kit work together,
• to record, rather than report, the important points in videos, pictures and words.

The picture shows my

1 Dell laptop. I am hoping there is Wifi because I want to be able to follow Tweets about the event via the #w2e hashtag identifier on Twitter Search. It is also essential kit back in the hotel room to keep up with the office in London, process all the material I will be gathering and knock out a regular blogpost.

2 Flip video camera. I’m going to ask several of the people I meet the same five questions and record them.

• How long have you been in social media?
• What social media kit have you got on you?
• Which part of your social media activity are you most proud?
• How are you using your social media footprint to network at this event?
• What one thing have you learnt this week that will help your business?
• What’s next in social media?

Then I am going to upload the recording to my Vimeo profile before posting it on my blog as a post.

3 Blackberry Storm. I’m concerned whether the battery will last each day but otherwise Twitter on my Blackberry Storm is going to be an essential cog in keeping me networked throughout the day.

4 Keyfob. All these years later, I am still so excited to be able to sit at my work desktop wherever I am in the world. What will it be like working through the company Wiki for the first time?

5 Exilim digital camera. I cannot get the quality of pictures with my Blackberry Storm that I can with my trusted digital camera so I will put up with the inconvenience of downloading. It’s not in the picture above because I had to take this picture!

6 Shades by Cartier. Heh, it’s the Web 2.0 Expo.

The etiquette of permission networking

You’ve heard of permission marketing, right?  As defined by Seth Godin, it is the transformation wrought by social media encouraging people to opt-in to rather than opt-out of marketing.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

What about permission networking? How does that work and what is the etiquette? 

I’m off to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the end of this month (disclosure: the conference is produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, a sister company of mine in the US).

Last time I was in San Francisco, I had been writing this blog for barely two months. And I had scarcely got going on Twitter. I still had the habits of a traditional broadcast editor in me, thinking nothing of emailing directly a leading and high profile social media expert.

But it takes a lot more than an email to convert a social media relationship into a telephone conversation. This social media guru very politely suggested we could speak on Skype a month later. 

Now I’m surprised he even bothered to reply.

Seven months later, nine months into this blog, five months into my Twitter profile, four months into my Google Reader and ten months into social media, I know better.

Just as social media has transformed push into pull marketing so it has transformed assertive into permission networking.

As I head to San Francisco this time round, I’m not going to be sending emails. I’m not even going to be picking up the phone. 

What I am going to do is

• Tweet out my preparations for the trip.
• Follow the Expo’s hashtag #w2e on Twitter Search to check on who is going.
• I will begin following people I am interested in and see if they follow me.
• Suggest a Tweetup each day.
• Update my status on LinkedIn and TripIt to alert my existing networks of my plans.
• Read Chris Brogan’s 27 things to do before a conference.

But other that those few things I will wait. I wait until people come to me.

And if they don’t, I will know that I need to spend even longer investing in my community before I try to convert social media acquaintances into face-to-face meetings. I will need to contribute even more to people’s conversations on Twitter. And I will have to comment even harder and way more intelligently on their blogs.

I’ve got a dinner booked already and a meeting, both through permission networking.

I’ll let you know how the rest goes.

Photo credit: theogeo