From the category archives:

Social Media

Roger Clemens Has Nothing on This Guy

by Daria Steigman on August 31, 2010

Influence, Popularity, and Community | Independent Thinking | Steigman Communications, llcSo I go out of town for a few days and miss the big sports story. No, not that story. This one.

What’s interesting about the Jay Mariotti story isn’t the facts. Or even the arrest. It’s the glee with which just about everyone has greeted the news.

Apparently this guy has no friends. Not among the community of athletes, coaches, and managers that he’s made his living writing and talking about. Not among his colleagues in the media. Even his co-commentators on ESPN‘s Around the Horn said they weren’t surprised by the sports world’s response to his arrest. One even said that Mariotti will “have to start rethinking how he goes about his business.”

It’s fitting to talk about this on a day that I participated in a tweetchat on the topic of “popularity versus influence.” See, Mariotti was influential (how else could he engender this much vitriol?). But he certainly wasn’t popular.

Business can be competitive. But it shouldn’t be mean. We always talk about the importance of community. That being helpful and giving back matter.

Here’s what you risk when you treat people as disposable. Or even just when they think you have.

Photo by Meddy Garnet (Flickr).

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7 Tips for Optimizing Your LinkedIn Brand

by Daria Steigman on August 18, 2010

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Brand | Independent Thinking | Steigman Communications, LLCIn keeping with the time constraints of busy, always on-the-go workers, MarketingProfs has created a new “Take 10” series: short, 10-minute presentations with actionable takeaways. I was smart enough to take 10 minutes out the other day to get a LinkedIn 101 refresher course from Jason Alba.

Alba offered four “do it once” tips for setting up your profile and six “do regularly” tips for keeping your brand front and center on LinkedIn. The highlights of his “do regularly” advice:

  • Pose a Question to your network at least once a month.
  • Answer Questions whenever you have a few minutes of downtime.
  • Join LinkedIn Groups Discussions, which let you reach an audience beyond your first degree network (or start a Groups discussion of your own).
  • Use Advanced Search to find prospects.
  • Use Company Search to gain competitive intelligence on your prospects and your competition.
  • Update Your Status at least weekly. (I’d actually recommend doing this more often as long you have something relevant to share—be it a useful link, a blog post, information about that killer conference you’re headed to, and so forth.)

I’d add one final “do regularly” tip: Read status updates from your network. You can do that easily by pulling in the RSS feed of all your contacts’ status updates. This is a great tool for keeping up with who has changed jobs, is sharing good news, or otherwise has something worth commenting on. I tend to skim the updates (there will be a lot), looking less at who’s connecting with whom and more at who’s sharing news. See something interesting? Click through, leave a quick comment, and become instantly top of mind.

Photo by Mario Sundar (Flickr).

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I’ve been looking at my Twitterstream in real time since Thursday morning. Unlike the streamtime approach we’ve become used to, real time has no updates. It is a non-stop stream. Instant-ness. Immediacy.

In a blog post aptly titled Trialling Twitter at the Speed of Wow, TweetDeck opened up an experimental version of its desktop app to a handful of accounts. I was lucky to nab one, and so I thought I’d share my first (very preliminary) impressions.

1. Much as our brains have had to learn to process growing amounts of information in streamtime, real time will force us once again to readjust how we process information. I’m not sure yet whether this process will be iterative or require new systems and tools.

2. Without the “chunking” of tweets (via timed stream updates), it’s easier than ever to miss key information–so setting up TweetDeck notifications for mentions and DMs is more important than ever.

3. You can once again pull in replies to people you don’t follow from people you do. This is a huge step to restoring the ambient discovery Twitter took away 15 months ago.

4. We’re following a lot more people than we were 15 months ago, and somehow we’ve gotten accustomed to the quieted stream. I’ve been experimenting with the new functionality restored sometimes–and sometimes silenced when the volume of tweets streaming by gets overwhelming.

5. I’d like to see Twitter (or TweetDeck and other app developers) create a tool that lets me selectively follow the public replies of some people in my Twitterstream without having to pull in all of them. A list that I can shape and reshape to fit what matters to me over time.

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Privacy, Identity, and Digital Fingerprints

by Daria Steigman on July 26, 2010

Web 2.0, Privacy, Digital Fingerprints | Independent Thinking | Steigman Communications, llcJeffrey Rosen has a terrific, thought-provoking article in last week’s New York Times Magazine about the end of privacy in our new digital era. In it, he writes:

We are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent—and public—digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts…

The truth is that, for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Rosen looks at the implications of this digital identify and explores potential legal and technological solutions to help us manage and protect our reputations. The article is long–but it is well worth taking the time to read.

Hat tip to Tim Taylor for alerting me to this one.

Photo by graphia (Flickr).

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