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Social Network Media - Create & Maintain an online Identity

27 April 2008 46 views 3 Comments

A very crucial trust building exercise is building, establishing and maintaining an Identity. This applies for your self as well as for your product, services, websites or blogs - anything that YOU authorize or commend. For a long time, before the advent of MySpace and Facebook, people have established Identity by word-of-mouth.

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In a small post early in 2008, I published a Nielson Report and analysis on how various countries are influenced by word-of-mouth, and its no surprise that that word of mouth not only is a strong influencer in buying habits, but also one when it comes to Identity & trust building.

If you are not a big fan of scrambling into any of the Social Media warfare, a few ways in which you can create and persist your Identity could be:

  • Have a logo - the logo should be in line with your practice. Don’t have logo of a nut & a bolt when youre in the business of photography.
  • Have a simple business card - don’t clutter it just because you think its colorful and beautiful. Keep it clean, simple and have all the correct necessary information. Check for spelling mistakes.
  • Have a voice message box if possible where people can call. Record a personal greeting for the caller. Return every call. If you think that you cannot return the calls, don’t even go for it.
  • Have a website - keep your theme consistent with your logo and your personal message.
That said, you cannot ignore the immense power of the social networking websites. There are a few risks that you automatically inherit when you create a profile with any of the social networks.
  • Since you would be using these profiles to either promote yourself or draw more people to your websites and blogs, it naturally implies that you are interested in people who similarly value those social network sites.As an extreme example, you will probably not publish the profile you set up in an adult dating network to any of your business associates. On the other hand, if you have a paid profile with Forbes, you will probably flaunt your profile in your signatures! Either way, you express your solidarity with any of the networks where you set up your profile.
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  • You have to maintain and keep all your profiles on various websites updated. This could be a tedious process. Remember when email was very new and everyone had one email ID with MSN, one with Yahoo!, one with AOL and soon their business cards had no more space for the organizations mission statement! It is advisable to have a selected few profiles with neutral social networks that you can use without any hesitation.
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  • The more profiles you create, the more you are subjecting yourself to spam and marketplace scams. Worse still, you could have your identity stolen. Read a similar post here. In some profiles you may like to share more personal information like your Emails & Contact numbers. In some, you definitely should not.

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Myspace is taking up a lot of heat these days. Reports and new articles say without any hesitation how Myspace, which once was a music sharing website, have transformed itself into a dating and more crudely a sexually predatory site.
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Facebook has taken over a huge number of supporters away from Myspace, especially in Europe, but it could on the same track in a few years. Though Facebook is struggling to generate revenue at this time, being labeled as a social networking site, much like Myspace, exposes it to all the same problems.
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The same is sadly true for Orkut, a free social networking site rolled out by a Google engineer by the name of Orkut. There have been numerous cases where a naive website like Orkut have been exploited by social misfits to their benefit.
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Yahoo!, Yahoo! Geocities, MSN Live, AOL are a few others in the same category, though none of these ever made it big like Myspace or Facebook. The one that has made a significant progress in the business domain and has clearly stayed away from the Social blemishes, is LinkedIn. It is now customary for sales people to look up LinkedIn and make cold calls. LinkedIn allows you to register free and has also got a few paid membership options with extra features to build and expand relationships.

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