In the past, I have seen people bristle at the notion of “personal brand.”

You know, and I know, people who have gotten high off their own Google Analytics and displayed an inflated sense of their own self-importance.

So what?

Really, so what?

That’s no reason to sublimate the ego in social media.

It is, despite what people say, all about you.

Why? I don’t care about every little detail of your life, and I don’t expect you to care about mine (even if I post it on Twitter and Facebook- and believe, that is far from everything).

What I do care about is what you have to add. Don’t forgo ego because people (and I’m not picking on Amber Naslund even if her excellent post for aspiring writers set me off) tell you to. That shouldn’t be enough reason anyway, right?

So, here are my reasons for making it all about You:

• You may or may not be an expert on some things, but you are definitely the foremost expert on You. Only you have had your experiences and opinions. Share them.
• Objectivity is great but news I can read anywhere. Don’t distill, add You. I know when I blog,
• Don’t worry if people don’t care about the “You” bits. More people care than you think- plus, you can always write it all out then pare back before you publish.
• Don’t worry bout becoming a “social media (jerk).” Actually, do worry- if you are worrying about it, then you probably are in less danger of becoming one.
• Corporate bloggers? Corporate-speak is necessary at times, but the most successful blogs inject the individual bloggers’ personalities. Is there a risk of the person eclipsing the brand? Two things: that’s where ego checks and common sense are actually required, and anyone- even the CEO- can be replaced as blogger without killing the brand.

People with healthy egos probably don’t need this advice. Maybe those are the people we need to worry about becoming obnoxious egotistical jerks.

Either way, I’ll end off with this great song “Watching the Planets” from one of my favorite bands, The Flaming Lips. The video is about as NSFW as it gets (lots of people running- and pedaling- around nekkid), by the way, but that’s how Wayne Coyne & Co. roll:

(Actually, I chickened out because my kid sometimes come to this blog, God knows why: if you want to see the video, it’s actually quite good, and it’s here:

http://www.buzzgrinder.com/2009/flaming-lips-watching-the-planets-nsfw/

If you really are into "killing the ego", the Lips have this cool hoodie for sale on their site (not an affiliate link, alas)

First thing first. No, I am not deleting/deactivating/scorning my Facebook pages.

It’s not because I am afraid of this (although on some level I am- and btw, some NSFW language on this South Park clip, if you can believe it):

On the other side of the issue, neither am I one of those reactionaries that thinks people are overreacting to privacy issues. Facebook, by its actions, has been pretty clear in that it is not interested in your privacy.

What I’m looking at is this: I have operated on the social web under my own personal privacy policy. Yes, Web sites have their policies, but Facebook has shown that whole world is confusing and quite likely untrustworthy. However, my personal privacy policy goes something like this:

• If I don’t want the world to know about something, I don’t post it. Anywhere.  I may overshare, but I don’t share everything. (Believe it or not)
• Having everything about you posted online is not the same as people giving a fig about the stuff you post online. The true danger of oversharing is not giving out your info, but boring people to death. (I’m sure I’m frequently guilty of that, but the great thing about boring is people ignore it and move on)
• If I post something, I assume the world can see it, even if I put it behind some so-called social “firewall.” Look at Facebook, where people don’t understand that friends of friends can see some ostensibly private materials- and one of those FoF’s might be your Mom. Yup, your Mom knows about that very secret thing you posted. Why did you post that again? (Here’s a little something for people who find themselves in that situation).
• The “Steering Wheel Lock Bar,” or Deterrent policy: I use this when posting photos of kids. With pictures of my kid, and especially anyone else’s, I post them to Flickr only, behind a “friends only” firewall- and videos go up behind a password. That doesn’t mean no one can see them, it just means to me that they’re far less likely to pop up in searches and seen by strangers than other photos and videos. Like the steering wheel lock, it won’t prevent your car from being stolen, but it will make the thief look at the next car first. I rarely waver from that policy. (You may notice that I do not put pictures of my son on Facebook; my high school classmates noticed; I told them to friend me on Flickr)
• If I ever worry that I am posting too much info online, I cruise through my city’s assessor’s database. A couple clicks, and you know what I paid for my house and what my taxes are. (Have any realtor friends? You can probably find out what I owe on my mortgage)
• Changing your credit card numbers is just a phone call away. (And it always has been)

Why am I not deleting my Facebook account like a few high-profile Internuts are doing? Because there are people there with whom I interact that I don’t see anywhere else. That’s the only reason I need. If those people move, or if I ever acquire enough juice that people would follow me to the Next Big, that would be another story. For now, it’s Facebook, but in the same limited way outlined above.

Privacy is not dead; it’s just not what we think it is. Forget social network privacy policies; just follow your own.

I am breaking up my usual “Top 5″ post for a couple of reasons: first, the two (not five) topics I picked were enough material to stand on their own; second, I wanted to monkey with the format to see if the posts turn out better if they are a little more focused.

Those who know me (or at least read this blog) know not only that I ride my bike for charity every summer in the Pan-Mass Challenge to raise money to fight cancer (please feel free to sponsor me at http://bit.ly/PMC2010- thanks!), but that I experiment with social media to raise funds, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube/Vimeo and other channels.

The people behind another anti-cancer movement, Ban Asbestos Now!, have also been enthusiastic about using social media to get their message out. It was their idea to team with me- I would try to draw attention to their petition to get asbestos banned (I thought it already was, that’s how little I knew), while they would donate cancer-fighting dollars to sponsor my ride.

While I had blogged about this as the campaign was going on, I wanted to take the opportunity to embed these videos the BAN folks made after the fact. While they have more signatures to go, I feel that even raising awareness is helpful in the long run– the same way I feel that people don;t have to donate money to be actual contributors to the cause.

I am breaking up my usual “Top 5″ post for a couple of reasons: first, the two (not five) topics I picked were enough material to stand on their own; second, I wanted to monkey with the format to see if the posts turn out better if they are a little more focused. Let me know what you think.

Image Borrowed from ByteMonkey Post

Utterli Depressing

Beginning in 2007, I started using a great service known as Utterli (actually, it was originally known as Utterz) to facilitate mobile posting of pictures, audio and text (and, if I wanted, video) from my phone. It was a great solution for reducing the barriers to posting more frequently and when ideas occurred to me. I got some wonderful help from their support folks when setting the service up with WordPress, and met several of them, as Utterly was based not far from Boston.

Over the last several months, it became apparent that Utterli was gearing down- friends who were still using it heavily complained of support disappearing, and I worried that my posts, or some of the material in the, might disappear.

Just this past week, I noticed the site was down completely, with no announcement. As you can see from this post for example, the photo and audio I had posted are now gone- thankfully, the text remains. On the one hand, it would have been nice to have a little warning and a chance to back up our stuff. On the other, Utterli was a free service and you have to expect some risk in relying on a third-party service to provide your content in the cloud. We got what we paid for, didn’t we?

Still: what’s up, Utterli?

It’s not about quantity, but the gold you can get from the chaos you create.

I joked during the Olympics that some of the duller (to me) sports could be “crossed up.” That is, have four or more athletes compete at once to create excitement, as in the snowboard cross and the ski cross events.

The excitement, of course, is in the chaos presented by the prospect of putting all these top athletes in a high-speed course at once, and the risk of collisions, wipeouts and controversy (of course, add short-track speedskating to the list).

Do… social media? We talk all the time about numbers and whether they matter. I have always been for having bigger networks rather than smaller, and these sports illustrate why. When you pile up the numbers, the chance of getting something interesting appears (forget increases- it appears, as in made possible where it wasn’t before). Think of this as a long-winded way of endorsing the idea of the “serendipity engine” that Chris Brogan likes to talk about. So, open the floodgates and invite the chaos– just have a plan on how to score the winners.

How can a social media “expert” make such a mistake?

David Meerman Scott, a very knowledgeable PR and social media person, “Re-Tweeted” the above-referenced promotion for the PRWeb service without checking for legitimacy. Does that make him any less knowledgeable? To the contrary, I think it should show that any company thinking about getting into social media should not be afraid of mistakes. We will all make them. There is too much going on, and mistakes will happen, we will get past them and move on (hopefully learning from it, or, in David’s case, even blogging about the lessons learned).

Twitter Phishing– Got Phished?

The recent Twitter phishing scam– in which people are tricked into giving logging into an ersatz Twitter application, which then takes over a user’s account, sending inane or even obscene direct messages, propagating the virus (or whatever it is) is not a new problem. But, it’s a fresh one. Got phished? Change your password immediately, and let people know you got hacked/phished/virused. Don’t worry about looking like a naive social media newbie (see previous item).

Single Point of Failure, Exhibit E

I say “exhibit E” because surely this is not the first or last. Free services for you blog an social networking come and go, but counting on any of them is a shaky proposition. One of my favorite PR/Marketing podcasts, “For Immediate Release,” was using the Sprout widget for embedding the podcast feed on blogs and sites (including letting anyone grab the code and put it on their site). Now, the service is going away (*cough* “sunsetting), leaving previous users in the lurch, while Sprout concentrates on growing its business with an enterprise product. Should I feel bad for FIR’s Shel and Neville? A little, but more to the point, it’s a lesson that any of these services we rely on could go away and affect our content and networks. I went through this with Utterli, which I used to use heavily on this blog, but I have been warned the service is in danger of disappearing, so have eased off it.

What to do? Build your own tools and host them, be redundant and back up everything multiple times so you can replace it, or design your content to be disposable. Whatever works for you (guess what I prefer).

Vimeo adding mobile support

As a premium account holder, I just think it’s cool that Vimeo is now transcoding content for mobile viewing. Before, I would have to upload a video onto YouTube as well (not a bad idea anyway) just so I could view it on my phone. Now I don’t have to, though as I just hinted I still might at times. But for private videos? One and done for Vimeo now (and yes, the originals are backed up).

This summary is for the benefit of blog subscribers who might not see some of the gr eat content over at MediaBullseye.com. Please visit there for my full article with details on how and why I made these changes. How has your social media usage? How will it change?

• I started using Facebook and Twitter as (mostly) distinct channels
• I gradually stopped using Utterli for blog posts
• I tried to use more video
• I surrendered to the geo-tagging craze

I frequently tire of the “xxx is dead” statements that are cavalierly thrown about the social Web. Here are a few, real and imagined, that caught my eye lately, and why they may not be true.

RSS is Dead: I understand that Steve Rubel is saying in his post, “As the Decade Closes, Has RSS Faded Too?” that he is migrating away from RSS readers (like Google Reader) to get his news feeds, and more to places like Twitter and other human-curated sources. The thing is, RSS is not only not dead, I would argue it’s immortal.

RSS has morphed from some sort of tool for end-users that nobody will ever understand in that context (despite the best efforts of some smart folks) to an underlying technology that drives a lot of the easier-to-understand interfaces– basically, any content site with a news feed.

As Shel Holtz said on Twitter: “Those who proclaim RSS dead are often those who herald the arrival of the real-time Web — largely RSS-driven.”

I would call RSS the “ghost in the machine” – but ghosts are dead, so…

Marketing is Dead: Granted, Forrester Research Senior Analyst Augie Ray admitted the title of his blog post was hyperbolic (and it worked), but there were some interesting points. No, I don’t think for a minute that marketing is dead in 2010, but Augie lays bare some of the big challenges we are already seeing. First point: Augie includes advertising, PR and other related practices under “marketing” and basically takes Advertising out back for a beating. More interesting is that companies have not figured out social media yet– no kidding, right?– but more specifically, the measurement metrics they are pursuing to date are not meaningful. So is 2010 the year marketing gets lost and can;t find its way back, or is the social media riddle solved by finding more effective metrics? What do you think?

The “Twitter will Never Make Money” Meme is Dead: Apparently, all Twitter had to do to get into the black was sign a lucrative search content deal with Google (and with Microsoft). How many clients have i had in the past who started out with content syndication of some sort as a means to “real” revenues? Rarely has it led to profits, but Twitter’s insane popularity made this possible. I also believe that it’s not the long-term revenue solution– that there’s more– so, that meme will live on as we continue to guess what Twitter’s next revenue scheme will be.

Blogging is Dead: Peter Kim did not actually say that in his post, “Some Thoughts on Blogging,” but he sets a good reminder that fading in frequency of blog posting- or in any medium– can make you forgotten or irrelevant fairly quickly. And Peter, I would love to see more regular posts from you.

Technorati Tags are Dead: Aw, sugar. I got nothing. However, I was actually asked by someone recently about the Technorati Authority score of this blog.  Can someone show me that Technorati retains relevance? I’d love it if it did, but I don’t really know.

BusinessWeek Editorial Layoffs; Just…Sad

Let’s pretend that Bloomberg has a master plan for a leaner, stronger, BusinessWeek after buying the troubled magazine recently. They probably do, right? It still boggled the mind to see the parade of high-profile pink slips given out this week: Stephen Baker, Heather Green, Jon Fine, Robert Hof, etc. (the RaceTalk* blog from RacePoint live-blogged the carnage for our…pleasure).  What struck me was that PR people felt genuinely bad. not that we shouldn’t, but one friend asked how we felt about the demise of the Industry Standard. I don’t remember PR people feeling so bad about those layoffs. Why? The Standard was notoriously hostile to PR people. businessWeek, besides being more practical, cuts stafff in a time where both flack and hacks alike share more conversations via social media. We know them a little better, and they are people to us, more so than in the past.

I wish every last one of them the best and have no doubt we will see big and interesting things soon.

Twitter to Users: Tell Everyone Where You Are: Yes, You in the Starbucks on Centre Street: You Too

Twitter has enabled geotagging. It’s interesting in that, in addition to other tools like FourSquare (of which I have become a big fan),  showing the world where you are is really coming into style. Cool? yes, for those activities whee you want it. Scary, too, though. Stalking should be a real concern, and I wonder if, as Don Tapscott wonders in his book “Grown Up Digital,” Generation Y-ers in particular don’t take enough care in protecting privacy. I’m curious to see how these tools will be used.

I’m Using Posterous

I have finally broken down and started using Posterous. No, I won’t use it for “Lifestreaming.” I have Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Friendfeed, etc, all making up a lifestream (except I still hate using that word). I will use it to post via mobile though, and from there distribute the content to the blog, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Stay tuned, I hope make it an effective use of content channels, though I don’t expect it to be a standalone blog in itself.

Yes Terry, you do slay you.

On the Internet, If You Are a Dog, Someone Will find Out

Wowee wow-wow stupid: person makes anonymous offensive remark on a newspaper newspaper Web site. Web site person tracks IP address and lets employer know (privacy violation? Maybe). IP address is at a school, and an employee posted the offending comment- from the school! Incredible. The employee resigned; with any luck there was a lesson learned.

Let’s Get Rid of the Term “Social Media D*****bag”

Ok, the term is “douchebag” but I try to keep this blog as PG-rated is I can. On the other hand, I’m not normally such a prude, and have even uttered the term myself, but it strikes me as misogynist, offensive, and pretty nauseating if you think about it. I even hear women proudly saying it. Maybe I am just a prude.

What would you think if we changed it to “social media colostomy bag?” I thought so. Some friends have offered alternatives- a personal favorite is “social media blackguard” from David Jones. Call me old-fashioned.

*Idle thought: As good as it is, is “RaceTalk” the most unfortunately-named PR blog, ever? Maybe “RaceBaiting” was taken. As Clarence would say, marinate.

This was originally published on the SHIFT Communications “Slice” Blog

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the SIPA (Specialized Information Publishers Association) Marketing Conference in gorgeous Miami Beach, Florida (I know, the life of a PR flack is tough). I was asked to do a little work (the nerve) and present on social media news releases.

In our world- especially here at SHIFT, home of the Social Media Press Release Template, this can be an “old hat” subject (dirty secret; it’s not old hat– still much to do and learn). At this conference, I was very interested to present in front of a different crowd- which, to my surprise, was very eager to learn and came armed with questions. I was also pleased and flattered to find SIPA board members in the audience.

Below is the presentation I gave, with slides synced to audio. Special thanks to Todd Defren, without whom I would not have been able to sharpen my plagiarism skills to present on his and SHIFT’s behalf:

Why did I consider myself a “stranger” at this conference? SIPA is very ROI-focused, and PR is notoriously, well, not ROI-focused (more dirty secrets!). One basic presenting tenet that was proved at my session? Bring data. People were very interested in the ins and outs of press releases and new social media formats, but the takeaway that was re-broadcast at the conference? The statistics on social media release vs traditional release performance from Andrew Parker (see slide 18). I provided context and caveats, and this was not what I considered the lynch pin of the presentation, but numbers rule.

That was more true at the next day’s panel on “Social Media Success Stories,” with Hunter Boyle of Marketing Experiments and Matt Bailey of Sitelogic. Hunter and, particularly, Matt were quite at home from the analytical side, but I was able to answer a pointed question about the ROI of Twitter with two points: Dell Outlet’s $3 million Twitter account (thanks to Jay Berkowitz for serving up the exact number from the audience), and was able to recount revenues realized from Twitter networking in my PR work. Numbers from a PR guy? I astonished myself.

What are you doing to get outside your normal comfort zone (for me, that’s the “social media” crowd, such as the one at BlogWorld Expo)? And what do you need to present to them to make sure you, as a stranger, can get your message across?

Also: a quick thanks to Mike McKinney and the folks at Comhaus, who worked diligently during the SIPA Marketing Conference to capture the sessions on audio and/or video. I hope to have access to the panel soon, and will share a link to other sessions when it is available.

Notice I didn’t call it podcasting? I’m not sure I want to set up a special feed for video subscriptions, but I am thinking about adding more video to the mix.

The challenge: I’m itchy about the visual piece of video. I think the visual element- even a talking head– draws the eye and attention better than pure audio. My aesthetic sense, however, cries out for something to look at other than my ugly mug flapping my gums.

So, here is my first experiment in how I might present video more regularly. As you can see, I showed my surroundings more than me- a trick I used in my Pan-Mass Challenge training videos. I think I still have to figure out some technical aspects, but I will definitely do some more– with real content.

Blog Experiment 11-18-09 from Doug Haslam on Vimeo.

What do you think? What would make you watch video blog posts here?