Drafting - Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

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Introductions in Person and in Text

The Living Web

I’m on a quest to organize my social networking. I don’t want a model — one that balances relationship and connection to ensure high return on the time I invest — not a dashboard that tracks everywhere I’ve been. To that end, a modified version of the writing process is working well.

In a recent discussion about networking, we talked about how to introduce ourselves. We agreed that it helps to know about the person or the situation that brought us to the introduction. It seems obvious I would introduce myself in one way to a client and in another way to my son’s newest friend. Introductions are relational and situational.

We know to adapt our personal introductions when we’re face to face, but forget online. Text looks like text.

Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

What’s the first thing we do when someone we don’t know asks us to connect? It makes sense to go to their page to find out who they are. Unfortunately, most of us wrote our profiles before we knew anything about the people on the site. Have your read your profile the day you signed up? Have you thought about the people who have?

The second step in the writing process is Drafting. I’m using this stage to define settting up our presence on a social site. Possibly the most important thing we do in developing a successful presence is define who we are on our profile page. The profile pages serves as an introduction for anyone who wants to know who they’re about to meet or who they’ve just met. Does your profile raise your profile

Use these tips to get more mileage from your social media profile pages.

  1. Research the culture of site.
    • Form a description of the primary group and secondary groups who use the site.
    • Make note of the groups they form and the kind of activities and information they share.
    • Most importantly, read their profile pages to learn the customs and language of the site. Read how your heroes and friends describe themselves and decide whether what they’re doing works.
  2. Write an authentic, but targeted profile for that social group. Think about how you would introduce yourself if you were in the same room.
    • Choose a picture that reflects the spirit of the social group. Including a picture makes your profile more memorable. Including the right picture makes that memory good.
    • Write formally or informally to match the culture and your goals. If you could only say one thing to this group, what would it be? Underscore that idea in the information you choose. Limit the extraneous details that might distract someone from seeing your most important thought.
    • Check the amount and type of information you share against the profiles that impressed you most. It naturally follows that the folks you want to connect with will find the same things important.
  3. Check back often to review your profile to be sure it’s still relevant and up-to-date.

A great social media profile can open doors and make connections that we might have missed had we done less. Like the about page on a blog, it represents us when we’re not there. Time spent to communicate with the audience who visits is a high-return investment.

Have you checked whether your social media profiles add to your net worth?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help with your profile? Ask Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

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Pre-Networking - How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

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A Model to Organize a Social Networking Life

The Living Web

I’ve been wondering and wandering around social networking for more than a year. The socialscape of the Internet keeps expanding. I keep finding connections to my friends in more places and getting more detail about their activities than I might have imagined. If I don’t figure out soon how to manage the information, I’m sure I’ll soon be buried by bits and bytes.

I’m on a quest to find a model to organize my social networking life. I don’t want a fancy dashboard to track things. I want personal competence and right choices made from experience. Right now, I’m looking at the writing process.

The Writing Process as a Model for Social Networking

When we write, we start a conversation. We put ourselves and our thoughts out there for readers we might or might not know. Public writing is a reaching out to connect with other people. The writing process balances structure and expression so that what we offer is clear, concise, and compelling to the people we’re trying to reach.

Social networking and writing both strive for authentic and successful relationships through communication. It seems that the writing process might serve for carving my way through the overwhelming world of social networks.

The writing process I work with looks like this.

Writing Process via Voyages in English (with permission)


The blue ovals show the steps in the process that focus on expression. The green ovals show the steps that focus on structure. Social networking is not as much about expression and structure as it is about ourselves and our connections. I’m going to modify the model to reflect that using the blue steps for ourselves and the green steps for our connections.

Pre-Networking - How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

If you’re like me, you probably belong to many social networks already. For the sake of this exercise, choose only one. We can’t write a book, a poem, a magazine article, and a dissertation at the same time. They each have a different form, format, audience, and message. Choosing only one social network will let us focus on how to get the most from our time.

The first step in the writing process is Prewriting. So I’m calling this Pre-Networking.

  1. Pick a topic: Choose one social networking site.

    Choose a site you know something about and where you already have friends and connections. Facebook, LinkedIn, or StumbleUpon might be good choices because each has a breadth of features. If we do this deeply for one site, that site will be a benchmark for all sites we use.

  2. Research the site. See how it’s structured. Go wide and deep.
    • Notice which friends participate and which seem just to be there.
    • See how and how often people act and interact publicly and privately.
    • Look for how they share information and the kind of information most shared.
    • See how the site handles groups, events, and links to other networks.
    • Read reviews and notice who writes them.

    Record what you learn some way or post about it.

  3. Narrow your focus: Choose one audience / purpose for that site.

    Every social networking site has its strengths. Some are social. Some are about content. Some are strictly business. Decide how the site you’ve chosen best works for you. By choosing your purpose for using that site, you’ll know in an instant which features support you and which sort of communities you want to be part of there.

  4. Note what information you might want to share.
    Over the next few days, read profiles of the people in your chosen communities.

    • Freewrite or outline the ideas about yourself and your work that you want to share.
    • Make a few notes about the kind of connections that you’ll have in this venue. Will you be an open networker? Keep this to friends? Concentrate on business contacts or potential clients? What sort of information will you share and not share?

    Sound like a lot? If you think about it, it’s an investment in saving time. Having a strategy and knowing a site inside out from the start, can save hours of time spent on things that don’t serve us, . . . or even worse, save us the loss of finding out months later that the feature we wished for has been there all along.

    How well do you know the social networking sites that you’re on?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Next: Drafting that Profile
    Work with Liz!!
    SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

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    Ramping Up Visibility - 10 Strategic Locations

    Filed Under Community, Successful Blog | 26 Comments

    Hello World, Can You See Me?

    The Living Web

    Every WordPress blog comes with an initial test post titled “Hello World!” as if the world might notice another blog post appear. We jump in. We write. We put our thoughts, sometimes our hearts, in the words and spaces. At some point we wonder if anyone, or enough anyones, will notice that we’re here . . . .

    Ramp Up Your Visibility - 10 Strategic Locations

    If we want to seen, we can’t lurk in the shadows. Sitting at home won’t get hordes of fans crowding around our web address. Commenting on blogs gets us noticed, but it takes time. What more we can do to get folks to see what we’ve got going on?

    The key to visibility is being in strategic locations where people will show you off and where other people gather to look. Try ramping up your visibility from these 10 locations.

    1. Someone else’s blog. Offer the perfect guest post for a blog with slightly more reach than your own. Each week choose a quality blog that has more conversation than your own. Study the blog and its audience. Know what makes it tick. Longer posts or shorter posts? What’s the tone — serious? irreverent? Choose a topic that fits right in. Introduce yourself and explain why you chose that exact blog for the exact the fully-written guest post that you’re sending along.

    2. Free press release sites. Write a free press release. Learn the art of writing a press release about your latest news and offers. Spend time writing an attention grabbing headline and explaining the information in ways that get readers to care. Send it out a free press release service. Do one a day for a week. See what they bring. With a few tweaks your press release might also make an engaging post for your blog.

    3. Internet radio. Become an active fan of an Internet talk radio show. Listen often. Participate and ask questions. Get to know the host and the audience. Write a list describing a subject that you’re qualified to discuss with them. Send it off to the host in an email proposing yourself as a guest. Better yet, start your own show.

    4. One Social Network Group. Participate in one group at a social networking site. Rather than trying to keep up with every social networking site on the planet. Do some research and find the one which offers people and ideas that will help you grow. Start by finding groups active on a subject that you’re passionate about. Spend time writing your introduction and your profile. Let folks know what you’re interested in learning more about them and curious about how to become an active participant.

    5. The Giveaway Counter Give something away for free. Find a way to let people sample your work, by offering them a “taste” of what you do. Choose a service or product of value. Know exactly what the product or service will cost when you charge for it. Check to be sure that it’s clearly branded with how to find you. If you can, invite folks to take two, so that they can pass one along to a friend.

    6. Targeted email or forums. Invite bloggers to answer a compelling question. Use email to a short list of folks you want to get back in touch with. Or write on a forum that knows you. Ask a question that you know that many folks have interesting answers for. Use their answers to write a blog post. As you include each response, write a few sentences about the blogger who gave it. Promoting other people is a great way to get folks to notice you too.

    7. Twitter. Follow the bloggers on Twitter who most interest you. Listen to what folks have to say and respond when they ask questions. Interact intelligently and politely when a short conversation ensues. It won’t take long before you have a sense of who’s there, and they have a sense of who you are too.

    8. Virtual, audio, or brick and mortar classroom. Offer to teach something on the web, on the phone, or in person. You might make an open offer on your blog, or you might see someone with a problem and simply offer your help.

    9. An event. Attend meetups and events. If you can’t find any, start one yourself. Choose one conference or group you’ll be part of this year.

    10. YouTube. Make a video. Put it on YouTube. Put on your blog as well. Any video you make will tell folks something about you. Get some folks to Stumble and Digg it. Then call all of your friends.

    Build a plan for letting folks know that you’re out here. Take your time. Pick the one location that most fits you and get going there first. Then move to your second choice. Every location offers an opportunity to reach out and let the living web know that you’re here.

    What places and spaces for raising your visibility have worked for you? Which haven’t worked out at all?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz!!

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    Google Changes the Game — 10 Sites Hit in October . . . Now Look

    Filed Under Successful Blog, Technorati, Tools | 13 Comments

    NOT Just a PageRank Update

    The Living Web

    Every Monday, I check in to see how the web world is treating me. It seems that Technorati has left me out in the cold . . . my 180-day archives have been only 60-90 days deep for over a year now. When I wrote last week, no one answered. . . .

    But it’s looking like Google may be having a change of heart . . . We could have a mutually-beneficial relationship again. Something more than a PageRank update is definitely going on. PageRank seems to be getting an entirely new definition.

    • I see it in my backlinks.
    • I see in new site links for Successful-Blog.
    • I see it in the way my SERPs are playing out and in the Webmaster tools information being reported.
    • I see it a change in PageRank for LizStauss.com, The SOBCon08 Blog and one other URL I own.

    Other signs life and page rank is changing . . .

    • Live PR Live Pagerank appears to be dead. Every site is coming up 0. Note: the Alexa ranks are coming through fine.
    • The same thing — 0 PR for every site — appears to be happening at Smart PageRank
    • iwebtools PageRank Checker is reporting changes and lots of “Datacenter down” responses.

    And then, of course, there are the blogs taken down hard last October . . .

    10 Sites Hit in October . . . Today

    Some stats collected by Daily Blogging Tips last October and the current page rank reported by more than one tool. NOTE: Google datacenters are still dancing, not all datacenters are reporting. That means numbers could go anywhere.

    I love looking for patterns in Google thinking.

    What does this mean? Do you care?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz!!

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    My 2008 Bucket List — Thank You, Jeff Pulver, for Asking

    Filed Under Community, Successful Blog | 40 Comments

    It’s a Movie! It’s a Thought Worth Having!

    The Living Web

    The idea of a bucket list isn’t a new one or that exceptional. We used to talk about such things when we were kids. Then it was

    If you had 6 months to live and all of the money in the world what would you do before you died?

    A bucket list is just that

    What would you do before you kick the bucket?

    Jeff has added a new twist.

    What things on your bucket list will you scratch off in 2008?

    Jeff Pulver made a bucket list in response to the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman movie by that name. But he didn’t throw out isn’t any nebulous challenge. Oh no! It’s what will we remove from our list curing 2008. As Jeff said,

    In the spirit of the movie, and in the spirit of trying to make 2008 be the year that we all start to do some of the things we would like to accomplish one day, I thought it would be fun to reach out to friends across the blogosphere and ask them to share some of the things on their “Bucket List” they hope to remove during 2008. For some of us, these are not necessarily our “New Year’s Resolutions”, but rather things we have been meaning to do for some time that we WILL get done in 2008.

    Then, tossed the ball to a few of us to respond — Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss, Jeff Jarvis, Fred Wilson, Andy Abramson, Steve Garfield and asking them to share their “Bucket List for 2008.”

    How could I say “no” to that?

    My 2008 Bucket List

    In 2008, I plan to knock a few things off the list of “what I want to do while I still have time” list. . . I know these for sure.

    • To be paid to speak, teach, and have ideas, and to get to do so in more than one country.
    • To attend the social media breakfast in London that Jeff Pulver has on his list.
    • To be an integral part of launching an original idea — an idea in progress — and to see that it funds itself.
    • To decide which book I need to write and whether I need to write it alone.
    • To get to know at least one new person a week.
    • To spend a weekend or more at a vineyard with the friend I’ve known longest, a weekend, at least, with two other such friends, and several hours in person with my best friend from college..
    • To find someone who ’s interested in getting this symphony out of my head and onto a musical score.
    • To travel with my son and to surprise my husband with something he wants but doesn’t need.

    thank you, Jeff Pulver for inviting us to keep each other alive and thinking.

    Of course, the giving back, the laughing, and the hanging out here with my friends goes without saying.

    Now I pass this along in hopes that some others might share their list too, because I’m interested:Sashi Bellamkonda, Becky McCray, Mike Sigers, Ann Michael, J.P. Rangaswami, Anne Wayman, Glenda Hyatt Watson, and Mike DeWitt.

    Actually, I’m really interested in everyone’s bucket list. What will you cross off your bucket list in 2008?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz!!

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