Here is a breakdown of how to use Quora, Focus and Namesake to enhance your professional reputation.

Quora

I recently wrote about using Quora for getting answers to business-related questions. While I think the quality of conversation on Quora can be good, sometimes you feel like you are posting a question into a big, black hole. Still, with the amount of buzz happening around the site, getting in now to “stake your claim” in your areas of expertise isn’t a bad idea.

When starting to use Quora as a reputation-builder, make sure to fill out your profile information thoroughly, including the sections on the site where you can include your “bio” for various topics. Even if you aren’t ready to spend time answering questions, you want to make sure your expertise is showcased concisely, otherwise people will arrive at your Quora profile page and have no idea who you are or what you do. Keep the length down and make sure the first handful of words convey something meaningful because this is what others will see when you answer questions in a given topic area.

To get more out of Quora, follow the topics that you believe you can contribute meaningfully to. Respond to questions when you have a specific point of view or expertise that hasn’t yet been demonstrated. Follow the people with whom you are truly interested in getting on their radar, learning from, or interacting with.

Quora has a section in your profile where you can post content. This can be a good place to re-purpose some of your relevant content and tagging it with specific topic keywords to add your two cents without specifically answering a question. You can also answer a question and link to your content elsewhere, although do this sparingly as this can appear gratuitous if you simply use Quora to point people to your blog or site. Don’t think of Quora as a “gateway” to your other presences, like your blog, but instead think of it as an opportunity to provide a snapshot of who you are and what you do on a site where people are paying attention.

Because of Quora’s breadth of topics, you can choose almost any area and set of topics to show what you know. However, the most active areas are the tech, new and social media, and mobile spaces.

Focus

If your expertise is useful to small business owners, you may want to head over to Focus. This site has been around a few years now and while Quora came out of beta with a bang, Focus has been building a rich database of information and experts a little under the radar and now boasts over a million active users. While Quora tackles a broad range of topics, Focus looks to help business owners make better decisions, so expect to find more business topics and technology topics related to business.

On Focus, Q&A is only one of the site’s features. Think of it as an expert network or “expert market” where business owners can not only get answers to their questions but download published research and attend live teleconference events.

As you fill out your Focus profile, you can opt to check a box to apply to become an official “expert” on the site, but there is no guarantee you’ll be chosen. Focus takes a careful look at several criteria to assess if you are actually an expert in your field and if you have a proclivity for sharing your knowledge with others in a longer format such as on a blog versus Twitter. They also look at your interactions and the retweets your content generates to see if what you write resonates with your community of followers.

If interested in having you as an official expert on their site, Focus will conduct a phone interview. Some experts providing long form research are compensated but not those solely participating in the community Q&A. Otherwise, you can contribute to the Q&A section in basically the same way you might on Quora. The site is constantly undergoing incremental changes to improve how it works, so expect to see better integration of features over time.

Namesake

Namesake calls itself a “community for real conversation.” Namesake takes a more “live” approach to conversations on topics, with announcements of conversations happening on the site, and the people participating and watching.. The conversations are then archived and can be added to over time.

There is a little more chaos on Namesake compared to Quora or Focus.com; every response isn’t carefully composed and the best aren’t always “endorsed” or voted up to the top. These are “conversations” after all. Namesake groups people, conversations and experts by topic, so like Quora and Focus, you should follow the topics that are most interesting and relevant to you, to find experts and to identify conversations where you can be an expert.

The site claims experts in broad topic areas, from technology to entertainment to politics. You can claim your areas of expertise (up to 10) when you are filling out your bio, but you gain expert credibility and status through endorsements from others for your conversation contributions. A nice feature on your Namesake bio is the ability to add video to showcase who you are and what you know.

Whereas Quora might feel like a place for tech insiders, and Focus is more business-oriented and straightforward, Namesake has a scrappier feel where tech hipsters are jumping into a sandbox to play and experiment.

Tips for Q&A Site Success

As you can see, all of these sites have Q&A as a feature, but Quora emphasizes this aspect the most. Regardless of which site you choose as your platform for showcasing your expertise, know that the process can be time-consuming (and possibly addicting). Here are a few tips for making the most of your efforts:

1. Pick one site. Be great. While you might dabble in all three sites to get a feel for them and to make sure they offer you the best audience for your information, to get more out of a Q&A site, you really need to pick one where you’ll spend most of your time and energy. Be thoughtful, and take care to get a feel for the community and learn the etiquette of the site. Be helpful.
2. Incorporate the site into your content production. If you’re already blogging and tweeting, participating actively in a Q&A site can feel like a burden. Look for ways to incorporate a little time each day on the Q&A site of your choice so you can be present, pay attention and add value. Over the long haul, you’ll find it easier and easier to make the time to contribute, but don’t get carried away and let it dominate your time unless it is proving to be a fruitful outlet.
3. Add to your content sharing. When you blog, find an appropriate way to share that in your profile or in an answer or as a post or update on a Q&A site. Make sure not to use the Q&A site as nothing more than a gateway or traffic driver to your blog or site, but do think of it as an additional place to archive examples of your work.
4. Go narrow, not broad. You can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be a true “expert” in many, many things. Part of building your reputation is knowing who you are, what you can offer others, and then focusing on providing consistent, valuable information. Sure, you can provide the occasional answer to a random topic (for example, I’ve responded to questions about RVing and parenting on Quora) because this shows you’re human and multidimensional. But when building your reputation and your brand, consistency is key.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q4: New Platforms and OTT’s Dynamic Duo Dominated
• Is Quora Worth the Hype?
• What Groupon Can Teach Us About Shopping and the Web

Cost

About.me is completely free, while Flavors.me has a free plan and a $20 per year version. Many of Flavors.me’s features are only available on the paid plan, including some that probably should be free but aren’t, like the font faces you can choose from.

Design Features

I found About.me slightly easier to make a good-looking page; the basic layout was more professional and better designed. Flavors.me, however, has four different page layouts available with its free plan, while About.me only has one. However, you can drag your main information box anywhere on the screen.

About.me offers users a variety of fonts, while Flavors.me makes you upgrade to get the more interesting ones.

Content Options

In About.me you can add links to any site (such as your own website), instead of being limited to popular networking services. Linking to your own site is a must if you want to use one of these splash pages as a business card. But as far as I can tell, the only way to add a link to your site from Flavors.me is to add it to your “About” section, where it can’t be styled to stand out from the rest of your description. However, Flavors.me offers linking to more services than About.me, and paid users can add custom content.

When you add a service in About.me, what’s displayed, whether you like it or not, is the icon of the platform and no other information. I think that this is a major problem. Besides wanting the clever name of your blog or your Twitter handle to be spelled out, I have found that many educated, professional people don’t have the slightest idea what any of those icons represent. So if you want to make a client-facing page, and your clients aren’t necessarily fluent in Web hieroglyphics, this is something to consider.

About.me also doesn’t allow more than one account on any of these services. I have three Twitter accounts and several blogs on the two platforms above. If you enter, for example, multiple Blogger blogs, the first one is assigned the Blogger icon, and any others are spelled out in the list, in the order entered. There’s no way, like in Flavors.me, to reorder your items through drag-and-drop.

In Flavors.me, I had some difficulties adding several WordPress blogs. It accepted one WP-hosted blog and one self-hosted WP blog, but for some reason, I couldn’t add another self-hosted WP blog, which happened to be my main blog. Not being able to add that defeats the whole purpose of having the page. Update: Flavors.me contacted me to let me know that the free plan allows up to five services to be added, which wasn’t clear in the documentation. It’s also possible to add a freestanding website using the RSS option under Content>Add.

External links operate differently in the two services. On Flavors.me, links open within the Flavors.me page. On About.me, if you click the icons, they open in a widget on the About.me page. But if you click links in the list, a new window opens.

Other Features

About.me offers a nice “Email Me” button and contact form. A similar feature is available on the paid version of Flavors.me.

You can use your own domain name with the paid version of Flavors.me, but not with About.me. About.me provides a dashboard with stats on visitors, social media reach, and more. Flavors.me makes you pay for stats.

Both platforms were obviously created to showcase individuals rather than to serve small businesses, and neither is perfect. AOL bought About.me just four days after it launched, while Flavors.me still operates independently. It will be interesting to see how both services evolve, and whether they will move to meet the needs of a professional audience.

Whether you run a one-person shop or a small business, either of these sites could turn out to have some practical use. I recommend trying them both. You may also want to consider such alternatives as Retaggr, GizaPage, and Chi.mp, which we’ve written about previously, or even the rudimentary splash pages now available with .tel domain names. I’d love to hear your take on them in the comments, especially if you’ve found creative ways to use them for business!

Do you use About.me or Flavors.me as an online calling card?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

Who said that the advertising models of print and yesteryear would be sustainable online? Everyone just hoped they’d translate, because porting old models onto new platforms didn’t require much innovation or effort. I’d argue that any publisher that has their eggs completely in the ad banner basket is missing the boat and is in for a Titanic-sized rude awakening.

The good news is that I’ve seen inklings of integrated campaigns online from some forward-thinking advertisers who are realizing that the old advertising methods don’t work so well online and that ad banner fatigue hit consumers in about, oh, 1999. Kudos to the companies who may not yet be getting it right, but are fighting the good fight to bust out of the old models and create some new ones.

So what are the new options for advertisers to reach potential customers? I don’t have a magic bullet for you, sorry, but I do have some wild and wacky ideas about advertising (hate it) versus social communications (love it).

• integration — think of how you can integrate your brand appropriate into conversations. Hint: Strategic social media marketing.
• placement — find interesting ways to place your brand into someone’s information stream. Hint: Virtual goods and gifts.
• overlay — develop ways to put your content into new places and spaces. Hint: Augmented reality.
• cross-platform — don’t just think Mac/PC or Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Hint: Hybrid online/offline.

I’ll leave you with these final thoughts and then let you ruminate — or argue with me, if you like. Most people do not want to consume ads. Many just barely tolerate them. A growing number of people completely reject them. If you look at the trends in communications over the last two decades, the patterns are clear. Learn from our past mistakes. Don’t be afraid to be different. Just make sure you have a strategy, some patience, and a flexible plan.

And please…don’t be an ostrich.

What is the future of advertising on the social web?

Photos by stock.xcnhg users flaivoloka and josecarli respectively

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Focusing only on traffic numbers, instead of the concentrating  on sharing content and building relationships will send you down the path to burnout. Here at WebWorkerDaily, we have multiple writers contributing  to help keep the content fresh. But for one-person blogs, blogging daily works for some and not for others.

If I had been blogging daily since the day I wrote my first blog entry back in 2000, I would have quit long ago. I know this because I’ve been burned out by blogging many times — and I’ve never blogged more than a few times a week.

It’s natural for bloggers to want many people to stop by, read and comment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with pressuring yourself to churn out content daily like a machine for the sake of traffic when blogging is just one of many things you do. If you do that, you’ll sacrifice quality and your mental state.

So how do you decide how often to blog ? What’s the magic formula? There’s no definitive approach to figuring this out. Instead, take time to ponder these questions to help you find what will work for your blog.

• Review your business goals. Increasing blog readership is a worthy goal, but how does the blog support your business’ goals? If your web site itself is the income generator, then you’ll need frequent fresh content. If the blog is for promoting you as an expert in your field, which in turns supports your consulting business, then you probably don’t need to blog daily.
• Know your audience. What jobs do your readers have? How much of their time do they have for reading blogs? How active are they on blogs and social media? What industry do your readers come from? Are they reading during the workday or after hours?
• Identify your contributors. Is your publication a a one-person blog or a group blog? Group blogs cut the chances of burnout.
• Look at the length of your posts. Some people with large followings write 1,000+ word posts; these people tend to publish less often. Readers may better tolerate daily posts when they’re shorter: 200-400 words. Some bloggers mix it up with longer posts on a weekly basis, with shorter posts filling in the other days.
• Check web site stats. After adjusting your blogging frequency, check to see if the stats have changed. Remember that while a change could be associated just with the frequency or posting, it could also be because the content quality or level of blog promotion changed.

If social media teaches us one thing, it’s this: There are no rules. This doesn’t mean all those “golden rules” and “commandments” are off the mark; these give folks an idea of what works. But blogging endlessly blinded to your goals gets you nowhere. Stay on the path and steer clear of burnout by knowing your goals and audience.

What other factors help you decide how often to blog?

Photo by stock.xchng user Jorge Vicente.

The most common option is to brand yourself under a company, which works well when your company name is unique, brandable and broad enough to encompass a variety of products and services. This option works well for technology companies, for example, like Google and Apple.

Another option is to brand yourself under your own name. This is the way I ultimately decided to brand myself, but coming to that conclusion wasn’t quick or easy.

How It Works For Me

In years past, I tried to identify and promote each of my business ventures individually, but more recently, I asked myself what my main mission was for my work and business. I was able to succinctly say that my goal was to be a resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Once I realized that I had that one central objective, I saw that it really served as an umbrella for all that I do.

All of my work in some way supports small business owners and entrepreneurs. I have one site that provides articles and podcasts on issues related to small business owners, as well as products and services to help them along their way. I have a radio show that covers topics relevant to this same group, as well as a web design company that serves, for the most part, solo entrepreneurs. And, of course, I write for sites like this one on topics relevant to the group.

That unifying thread of serving small business owners and the entrepreneurial crowd shows itself in everything that I do, and usually, clients who work with me through one of my sites end up working with or following me through one or more of the others, so I decided to simply introduce myself under my own name. I changed my email signature, Twitter handle, Posterous handle, etc. to my personal name (or a shorter version of it), and now, when I introduce myself, my business card points people to my main web site (the domain is my name), which then links them to any of my business ventures that fall under the umbrella of what I do.

Instead of trying to wrap my mind around all the different products, companies, or spin-off sites that I develop, which will likely be an ever-growing and changing list, I now focus on thinking about what I personally want to represent and be known for: helping small business owners and entrepreneurs through a variety of resources, products, and services. People start with knowing me and what I do and then figure out which of the sites under that umbrella might help them.

Other Successful Examples

Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, and Gary Vaynerchuk are examples of successful entrepreneurs who identify themselves by their own names rather than those of their companies. They each have two or more sites, books, or companies underneath them and are considered experts in a particular area or niche. Seth Godin is known for marketing, Chris Brogan for social networking, and Gary Vaynerchuk for parlaying passion into business. Their followers know the niche that they serve, and they know them by their individual names first then that of their companies or products.

Michael Port is another example. He has his main, personally-branded site, MichaelPort.com, which directs visitors to any of his books and programs. People know him as a marketing expert, or maybe as the “book yourself solid” guy. They don’t necessarily remember every one of his books or products, but they know him and his name, and they know what he represents.

When to Go With Your Name

I think that if there’s even a remote chance you’ll start another business, sell your current one, or change directions, it’s probably better to go with your name over that of your company. This option works well for entrepreneurs and writers especially. If you think that you’ll start spin-off companies, products, or services and want to be known as an expert on a particular topic, then going with your name might be the easier choice when it comes to branding and promotion.

For me, it’s been much easier to promote myself, definitely, but I’ll also say that it seems to be a lot easier for new contacts to wrap their mind around what I do as well. They immediately see that I do a variety of things, all geared to help them as small business owners. It has made things easier to manage, and I’m much more confident in my marketing efforts as a result.

How do you promote yourself, as your name or that of your company? What made you decide to go that way?

Photo by Flickr user Frogman!, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Preparing to Start a New Group

Before you start creating the group in LinkedIn, brainstorm the topics you want your group to be about and do a little research. Search for those topics in  the Groups Directory to see what already exists. If the group that you want to create already exists, don’t give up hope just yet. Take a closer look at those groups to see if they’re active and have a decent number of members. Plenty of people start groups without following through.

If your topic does have active groups, look for a gap. Can you narrow the topic? Combine it with another topic? A little mind mapping may help find a unique twist on your topic.

Picking a name for your group is important. You could name the group after your brand, but doing this may turn away potential members who don’t use your brand yet are very interested in your topic. Browse the group names on offer. Would you want to be a member? Remember that LinkedIn lists the groups you’ve joined in your profile unless you turn off the visibility setting. As you think about a name and topic for your group, consider whether members would want to have the name showing in their profile.

Creating and Promoting Your Group

By this point, you have your name, topic and purpose of the group figured out. While writing the description of the group, include the keywords that will help people find your group. Before promoting, list the group on the Groups Directory and add content such as tips, links to valuable articles related to your topic and upcoming webinars and events. Posting some content to the group before promoting it is a good idea, as it gives people a taste of what to expect if they join the group.

Once you have posed some content to the group, you’re ready to start promoting it. Mention your group to all of your social media and marketing resources. Put it in your email signature. Add it to your web site and blog. Tweet about it. Post information about the group in your LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz and other social media status updates. When promoting the group, let prospective members know what they will get out of it. You could write a blog post about the group outlining what’s in it for the reader.

Maintaining Your Group

As the group owner, you can send emails to group members. These emails have a high deliverability rate because most email services recognize LinkedIn’s email address, which lowers the rate of ending up in the spam folder. Take care in balancing how many email messages you send to the group. I’ve left some groups and changed my settings for others because they sent too many messages that overwhelmed me more than they helped me.

You may want to assign the “group manager” role to colleagues to help out in maintaining the group. Group managers have the same administrative access as the group owner, which includes managing membership and discussion. The only actions the manager cannot do is transfer ownership and close the group.

“Group moderators” have the ability to police and delete group content, manage RSS feeds and feature a discussion. Moderators cannot control invitations and requests to join the group, or make changes to settings. Group members join the group and control their own settings on how other group members and the owners can contact them, and how to receive notifications from the group.

Groups can have subgroups, which can be useful for some businesses. For example, the GigaOM Network could create a group page and each publication (WebWorkerDaily, jkOnTheRun, etc.) could be a subgroup.

Think of a group as providing valuable information just like in a blog or email newsletter. The best and most successful blogs, email newsletters and groups focus more on providing value and less on promotion.

How does your business or brand use LinkedIn?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Social Media in the Enterprise

Two days ago a friend of mine asked me to review her résumé. Since she’s a graphic designer, I wasn’t surprised that some elements of it reflected her design style. She didn’t just pull up an MS Word template and fill it out.

This made me wonder: Apart from the usual web sites, business cards, and letterheads, are there other opportunities for us to brand ourselves?

Résumé. To elaborate on my friend’s job-hunting experience, she noticed that as she lined up for job interviews, a few of the other candidates had creative résumés as well. Though it may be common for designers, I don’t see why people working in other industries shouldn’t take a similar approach. As long as the execution is legible, cohesive and easy to understand, it may be a good way to stand out from the crowd of applicants. Georgina provided some excellent creative résumé pointers in a recent post.

Email signature. You can also use your business tagline or brand statement under your name in your email signatures. If overdone, this can seem too bothersome and intrusive, so keep the statement short and simple. I’ve seen some colleagues use this differently as well, adding links to industry-relevant PDF reports and white papers they’ve written. Your email signatures don’t have to be always be branded in the same way, either. Use a different signature for each target audience.

Invoices. Even the documents you use to charge customers can be a branding opportunity. If you send paper invoices, this also helps to make sure that the client won’t lose it in a pile of paperwork. For inspiration, you can check out these creative invoices featured by Smashing Magazine.

Milestone sheets, progress reports and other related documents. It’s perfectly sensible to put your logo in these documents, even if you’re already working with a client and don’t necessarily have to sell new services to them. Branding your documents in the same way you brand promotional materials ensures consistency. If these files are misplaced, the client only has to look at the logo to see who sent them.

Avatars. Our social media avatars are usually the first impressions that new contacts have about us. Having a strong image in your avatar makes the branding happen earlier than, say, waiting for them to look at your blog or web site. Last year, Aliza wrote an extensive post on this subject.

Which of these branding opportunities do you already use? Are there other uncommon ways you brand yourself online?

Image by bury-osiol from sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Personal branding

Michael Port’s concept of personal branding starts with his belief that, “When you work with clients you love, you’ll truly enjoy the work you’re doing; you’ll love every minute of it. And when you love every minute of the work you do, you’ll do your best work, which is essential to [booking] yourself solid. Second, because you are your clients; they are an expression and an extension of you.”

The cornerstone of his philosophy is that “the greatest strategy for personal and business development on the planet is bold self-expression,” and many successful personal brands have used this very strategy to rise to the top.

The Food Network is filled with great examples of personal branding success stories using the “bold self-expression” strategy, and while the brands are very unique, they all attract their individual audiences by being exactly one thing — themselves.

Take three of the popular Food Network personal brands: Rachel Ray, Paula Deen and Emeril Lagasse. They each have individual flare and have used that individuality to create tremendous personal success.

It doesn’t matter if you like their individual personalities. In fact, the people who dislike them are probably as relevant to their branding efforts as their loyal fans. They boldly demonstrate who they are, like it or not, and that’s exactly what makes them successful.

As Michael Port says in his book, “In order to create a respected personal brand, you must be fully self-expressed. You can’t hide behind the shingle that you’ve hung over your door and you can’t water yourself down in any way, shape, or form.” That’s an important quality of the personalities at the Food Network; none of them are watered down. They’re bold, they’re in your face, and they’re successful.

But how do you mimic their efforts and create your own successful personal brand? That’s the easy part. Figure out who you are and who you aspire to be. Then figure out the conditions that must be met in order to always be representing that brand. Only work with clients who meet those conditions and are best suited to work with you. Never water yourself down. Never live outside of integrity. Be true to yourself — always. It’s the surest way to guarantee that you only work with ideal clients, meaning better service, better results, greater client satisfaction, and in the long run, a truly successful business.

How do you make sure that you only work with the most ideal clients for you? What methods do you use for interviewing and screening clients before taking on their work or projects?

Images from the respective web sites of Michael Port, Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, and Emeril Lagasse.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Public Cloud Will Dominate Enterprise IT — One Day
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

BzzScapes is a new venture from marketing company BzzAgent that groups user-submitted content according to brand, so that you can stay up to date on the company or product of your choice via a variety of different types of web sites and media, with each brand having its own BzzScape. Compared to Alltop, there are two main differences. First, anyone can add any content they want (which means it may or may not actually relate to the brand in question), and second, anyone can vote and comment on things added, which should, in theory, mean that the best sources rise to the top organically.
I find it useful because part of my job involves making sure I keep abreast of what’s going on with Apple at all times. Staying current is easy enough, but knowing the slightly more obscure news and whisperings is what gets you ahead in my field, and that’s where BzzScapes steps in. Books, blogs, images, stories, video and more are being added all the time to the Apple BzzScape, which I can navigate either in grid, list or landscape view.

Aside from contributing to BzzScapes for companies that probably don’t really need the press anyway, you can also create your own BzzScape, which is another reason web workers should take note. Creating your own BzzScape for your own personal business or that of a client is another way to monitor and improve your presence online and in social media. Even if at first, you and coworkers are the only ones stocking it with content, the hope is that with time and exposure, others will begin to join in as well, and eventually you’ll have a nice supplement to your existing accounts on Facebook and Twitter with a little more to offer interested visitors.

One caveat before you sign up, should you choose to. The registration process itself is incredibly tedious. That’s because you’re actually registering for BzzAgent, which is a marketing research web site that wants to mine members for customer data in exchange for giveaways and promotions. So they ask a lot of questions. Including, oddly, whether or not I smoked, which appeared on its own page after three pages of other, much more standard questions.

If you can tough out the sign-up process, I think you’ll find that BzzScapes is worth it. It provides an interesting way to find new content that you might otherwise not have come across, and it could potentially become a valuable marketing tool for your own work.  Registration is also free, so it won’t cost you anything to try it out.

What tools do you use for tracking brands online?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The problem is a familiar one. Those of us who champion the use of social media tend to be fairly zealous about its use, but trying to transmit that passion to others, especially to key decision makers, can be a trying affair. For instance, I’ve had recent experience with a Managing Director who actually didn’t use a computer, so you can just imagine how easy it was to convince him of the value of having a corporate Twitter account.

Of course, it’s to be expected that senior executives exhibit a degree of technological inertia. Luckily, they all still speak the same basic languages: Return on Investment (ROI), Brand Recognition and Corporate Image. Even if they don’t speak all three (take a small consulting firm, for example, which depends on word of mouth rather than aggressive branding), they will understand one of the above: ROI, which is what I’ll be covering in this post. Social media is a hard area in which to gather solid ROI figures, but it’s not impossible. Plus, it can be very easy to sell on the expenditure side, since most of the time the only cost involved is the labor of the resource tasked with setting up and maintaining your social network accounts. That alone is a convincing argument in a business climate which is shy with its advertising dollars but eager to maintain a public presence.

You can show ROI by gathering info on click-throughs from links posted via Twitter, or on Facebook, on profiles, groups, and pages. I find Twitter especially useful for attracting clicks, since your tagline, not the URL itself, is the seller, thanks to URL truncation. If you can write clever copy, users will click, and they won’t necessarily feel as “marketed” to if they don’t see your corporate address in the URL.

Providing the decision-maker with comparable examples of successful social media program implementations in your space is probably the best, and easiest, way to show verifiable ROI. If you can’t find any examples in your specific field, collect near misses and play up the fact that you’ll be a pioneer in your area. Mashable has a great article on establishing ROI for social media that talks about setting a success metric, and benchmarking competitors will help you do that.

If they’re not sold on the fact that online presence makes good money sense, you might want to sell them on the business card metaphor, which goes as follows: You would never leave a business meeting, lunch, coffee, etc. without exchanging business cards with the other party, would you? Even if it’s a sales call that wasn’t particularly promising, you leave the card, and hope your name comes to mind when they need something down the road.

Imagine the cumulative time your company spends doing work online as a business meeting, and then imagine that, to date, despite all that time spent with prospective clients, you’ve been leaving them with nothing but a hastily scrawled phone number on a bar napkin (your email signature, for the purposes of the metaphor). That wouldn’t fly in the real world, and it shouldn’t be allowed to suffice on the Web, either.

Of course, your boss or client could counter with the fact that you have a web site. Explain that just having a web site is like leaving a business card tacked to a public bulletin board and hoping people will take interest. Social media is the handshake, the lunch meeting, the phone call during which you ask about the family. In other words, social media brings that priceless “people” factor online.

It may seem silly at this point to still have to sell clients on the value of social media, but it only seems that way because we live inside that world every day. Impossible as it may be to believe, there are still some, like that Managing Director I mentioned before, who dictate their emails to their assistants. Talk about someone who needs the perspective of a helpful evangelist!

What strategies do you use for convincing clients of the value of social media?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

You don’t have to spend a lot to get something that looks like it was professionally designed. Even if your company name is just your own name, which is the case for a lot of freelancers, you should take the time to make sure it can become a recognizable brand.

A lot of people are daunted when faced with even basic design work, but, even without advanced tools, you can produce something impressive enough to work as a website header or make an otherwise blasé business card design pop. First, let’s assume your only tools are a basic office suite, and you have absolutely no drawing skill.

I once worked for a company that used PowerPoint as its primary graphics editing and layout software. It’s definitely not the ideal solution, but it does teach you how to do as much as you can with what you have. Working in Word and PowerPoint taught me that fonts and typography go a long way.

First, choose a font that looks good. It can even be a system font, as long as you steer clear of ones that feel dated and/or are overused (i.e., no Times). For example, look at this ad I did for The Southernmost Review, a friend’s journal which I help edit:

I used Georgia for the font, which ships with OS X, and is a nice alternative serif to Times that looks just different enough to catch people’s attention. I used three different text boxes, so that I could easily control spacing between paragraphs, and the hue of each word.

All of the text is overlaid on a simple square shape, with a gradient fill and a thin blue border. In OS X, I do a simple area screenshot using Shift-Command-4 and drag a square around the object. There are Windows freeware apps that do the same thing, like MWSnap.

If you are limited to using a basic editor like PowerPoint or Word, try playing with alternate spacing between letters, or font weight (i.e. Bold vs. Regular) to introduce visual interest without getting too complicated.

If you happen to have Flash, Photoshop, or Illustrator, it’s even easier to create a snazzy logo quickly and without hassle. Consider this logo I created for my personal blog, TheDether.net:

There’s not much too this logo, even with the addition of the graphic flair on the right. The font is Helvetica Neue, which ships with OS X, and the effects are stock Photoshop layer effects (Inner Shadow and Gradient Overlay, with blend mode set to Normal). The graphic I created separately in Photoshop, by drawing circles, warping them, and using the Gradient Overlay tool to provide the color.

Note how few layers there are. Believe me, I want this to be as simple as possible, and I’m sure you do too. I’ve expanded the layer effects so you can see how they’re applied. Note that I also tried a Drop Shadow effect, but later disabled it because I wasn’t satisfied with how it looked.

These are just a few simple examples. Often, I use a combination of Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop to get the effect I’m after, but in most cases, it’s not necessary. In fact, if you’re just after a recognizable, uniform way to display your own name on your website, business cards, etc., you want to be as miminal as possible, so that the effect is easy to replicate no matter what programs you have access to.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

One important benefit of qualifying your clients is that you don’t waste your time.  You get the clients that you want to work with, you’re paid the rate you want, and both parties have realistic expectations.  You don’t spend hours working on a proposal that your client eventually rejects because they realize that you weren’t on the same page after all.  If that scenario sounds familiar, then it’s time to start qualifying.

What criteria can you use to qualify clients?

Price

The easiest way to qualify clients is based on price.  This means that you’re trying to avoid clients who will try to haggle you for prices that are below your bottom line.  While negotiation is part of any business, it’s also important to work with clients who understand your worth.

Does your branding and online presence reflect your price?  If you’re one of the highest-paid online freelancers out there, can your potential clients know that based on your site design?  When they look at your portfolio, do they see that you’re only working with the biggest names in their industry?

The same applies if you want to be the more affordable option, you’d want to make sure that this is reflected in your marketing materials as well.  Your affordable rates should at least be hinted at in your website, if you can’t state exact figures.

Stage of Development

There are businesses that are mature, while there are others that are so new that they’re asking you to design a website when they haven’t figured out their target market yet.  Do you want to work with startups that are still figuring out their identity, or do you want to work with established businesses?  Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

Startups can be exciting because you’re part of the birth of something new, but you might encounter multiple revisions under a low budget as the company tries to figure out what works.  Established businesses, on the other hand, might be more straightforward with what they want, but they may be hesitant to change their old approach to some things, even if this approach does not work.

It’s up to you to judge where you’ll thrive, the conception of something new or the revitalizing of something old?  Incorporate your answer into your branding so that you can be there for new clients during the stage where you can be of most help.

There are also businesses that are under a problematic stage, and they turn to you. If you like these types of challenges, that fine.  But know that while these problems can be simple and superficial, that’s not always the case.

Some problematic businesses are dysfunctional throughout the organization, and yet their owners think that a simple website redesign or a new press release will be a fix-all.  They want hire you because they think you’ll give them better profits, when all you can give them is a band-aid solution.  They actually need stronger marketing efforts, a new image, or a more productive system – something that may be out of your expertise or job description.

Unless you’re an expert at what your client truly needs, you’ll never be able to provide the solution that can help them the most.

Branding

When qualifying your clients based on branding, you’re judging the character of their business because you want it to match your own.  The benefit of qualifying clients on this level is that you truly understand their business.  You understand their vision, culture, and ideas because they are similar to yours.

If you’re the more laid back type of web worker, it might be more difficult for you to work with clients who are corporately competitive.  They might call you every hour and expect you to pick up 24/7.  Or if you’re a formal type of person, maybe you’re not the ideal freelancer to work with “Poop Jokes Inc.”, since you might not “get” the spirit of their business.  You’ll be out of touch.

While there are many criteria you can use to qualify clients, it doesn’t mean you have to use them all.  Just use the ones that are important to you.  Of course, this will lessen the number of leads that convert into clients.  But know that the ones who approach you will be closer to the kind of clients that you actually want to work with.

Do you qualify incoming clients?  How do you do it?  Is your approach direct or more subtle?  If you don’t qualify clients, how do you deal with the problematic clients that come your way?

Image credit: Rose Ann from sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

As a web worker who cares about your career, it’s just plain good sense to do what you can to make sure that your income survives increased competition. Fortunately, WWD has offered plenty of advice on that score over the years. Here are an even dozen of our best articles and tips for supercharging your career.

Manage Your Online Presence

As a web worker, you are who you are online. While you’re unlikely to make the most obvious of mistakes (unlike those poor people who post drunken photos on MySpace and live to regret it when applying for a job), managing your online presence is a proactive endeavor. You need to think about what face you’re presenting to current and potential clients.

Build Your Brand

Your online presence is the sum of all of your activities on the internet, but your brand is both more focused and more diffuse. On the one hand, it’s a subset of your online presence that’s designed to quickly tell potential customers what you offer and why they should pay for it. On the other, good branding extends past online to other interactions with your clientele.

Pursue New Work, and New Types of Work

Now is a good time to review whether you’re trying to get all of the work that you can do. Is your career definition too narrow? Are you doing enough to get the word out?

Keep Your Costs Under Control

If your income stream is looking potentially shaky, the time to take action is now, not when you actually run out of money. In addition to pursuing new work, you can take advantage of the web and the culture surrounding web working to lower your costs of doing business.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

If you’re a freelancer who isn’t completely buried in work, this is a good time to think about spreading your own personal brand (or marketing message, if you’d prefer to think of it in those terms) more widely. An investment in marketing today can pay off in more work next month – and it’s an investment that’s best made before you run out of work. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to make yourself more visible online. Here are five suggestions.

1. Help out others. Offering online support is usually thought of as a “pay it forward” activity, helping others out as you were helped out by others. But it’s also an easy way to increase your visibility. Pick a Google group or online forum, and start making a concerted effort to answer questions (but only when you know the right answers, please!). Sign each message you post with your URL. Eventually someone who wants more help will follow up directly. I got my first consulting gigs this way, many years ago, by being active in CompuServe forums.

2. Buff up your web site. I’m assuming that you have a web site – but when was the last time you took a critical look at it? Does it accurately showcase your skills? Is it obvious what you can offer to other people? Is it reasonably modern in its look? Is your contact information incredibly easy to find? If you haven’t tuned it lately, now’s a great time.

3. Contribute to open source. If you’re working with an open source framework, don’t just be a consumer – be a contributor. “I’m an active contributor to the XYZ Framework, which proves I know deeply how to use it” can be a real deal-closer. And if you become a valuable contributor, the overall project maintainers may well be in a position to throw work your way.

4. Do some writing. Even if you don’t have the time or energy to write a book, you should be able to contribute to some project’s documentation, write blog entries, or put together a screencast, podcast, or ebook on some subject where you have expertise. This is another way to demonstrate to potential clients that not only do you know what you’re doing, you know it well enough to teach others.

5. Keep your resume up to date. In the web world, this involves more than just listing your skills and gigs. Look at our advice on building a social media resume, or consider a service like VisualCV to make yours shine. If someone were to express interest in your services today, would you have a knockout and up-to-date way to show them what those skills are?

What other ways have you found to stand out from the freelancing crowd?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Public Cloud Will Dominate Enterprise IT — One Day
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

I picked up on this idea from @Pistachio, though it’s been going around. The screenshot is from my own Twitter page – which now, thanks to the ability to upload a custom background, promotes my field, shows my availability, and tells people how to get hold of me. If you’ve got a modicum of talent with any graphics program and a few minutes to spare, you can do the same. The only drawback: no clickable links. But it’s way better than letting Twitter provide the default background, or posting pictures of your cats.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

The last time we looked at Twing, Mike found the forum friendly search engine to be a useful tool in the search arsenal, particularly for finding help from others who may be experiencing similar issues.  A recent Twing update now adds functionality to make this process even easier for those looking to monitor forum discussions for their brands or products.

These newly added features include the handy ability to save frequent searches and to view what they call Buzz Charts. Buzz Charts visually display what is hot in the various forums that they index. They also let you prepare a comparative view of multiple terms to gauge trending.

Fancy presentation doesn’t mean a whole lot if the data behind it isn’t strong though, and here I found Twing to be somewhat hit or miss. Results for some of my test search terms came back strong with recent results while others were a bit less so.

For example, a search for Tivo at the forum level did come back with the largely popular Tivo Community Forum, but when looking for posts or topics specifically about TiVo I couldn’t find anything from them mixed in with the results.

I wouldn’t rely solely on Twing, but as a compliment to other services it can help you better keep track of the online discussions about your product or service.

How do you track your brand online?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks