I saw Mel Gibson on a talk show last night. He was there to promote a new action flick he has coming out, and the host asked him about his “Three E” approach to movie making. He responded that there are three things he tries to achieve with his movies: first entertain, then educate, and then, if possible, elevate.

I instantly thought these were admirable objectives to shoot for in almost any kind of communication, though the order of priority would vary depending on the type of communication and its purpose. It may seem like I’m stating the obvious, but what came to my mind right away was how appropriate these three objectives would be for a content development strategy.

Then it occurred to me that in this context, there has to be a fourth “E,” one that is pretty critical in the social Web: engage.

I wrote about content strategy not too long ago. It’s a hot topic and a rising career field. So if you create content (and who doesn’t these days?), you might want to ask yourself if your content satisfies any of these four criteria. Think of them as a kind of quality control standard.

The content you create — from animated demos to blogs to tweets to videos on YouTube — all influence your clients’ and peers’ perception of you. As a professional, you understand the importance of the quality of your product, and you should consider your content as one of your products.

Think about the people you follow on Twitter or whose blogs you read. Chances are your favorites provide a lot of Es. I looked at the tweets of one of the people I enjoy following, and found that most of his tweets qualified:

Just for fun, take a look at what you put out there and do a quick analysis to assess the quality of your content based on the four Es. What do you see?

If you want to learn more about content strategy, don’t miss “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” two days devoted to the topic in Paris in April.

What guidelines do you use for the content you create?

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What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

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Charles liked the wide array of services you could claim with DandyID, along with its handy Facebook integration. I’ve been a user of DandyID for a while now, so I wanted to dig a bit deeper into what it has to offer and what differentiates it from the other providers in this space that I’ve looked at.

The thing I find most intriguing about DandyID is that it’s much more than just a list of services. It’s part of a grander scheme to facilitate a single point of entry for information that can be used all across the social web. DandyID has a well-developed API (Application Programming Interface) that enables other applications to communicate directly with your DandyID profile. So while on the surface it appears simple, there is a huge opportunity for integration between services here.

Imagine a profile that is entered in one place and then used  automatically across all of your services. Make a change in one place, and it updates all of your linked profiles automatically. Add a new service to DandyID, and a site like FriendFeed could automatically get notified to add a new item to your profile feed. The geek in me is tremendously excited about the possibilities of this; I’d love to see more sites enable this DandyID functionality.

The API has already been used to power the SNUM — Social Network User Mapper, a nifty Firefox add-on that will tell you what networks a person belongs to as you encounter them on the web. A Ubiquity command is also available.

DandyID lets you verify your identity with some services to confirm that you are actually who you say you are. Using the authentication functionality built into Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Flickr, MySpace and YouTube, you can confirm that the external accounts you are linking to are indeed yours. There is nothing to stop people from claiming an ID, but the verification is a nice level of extra assurance.

With an upgrade to the Pro service ($4.99 month) you gain access to some useful statistics, such as how often people are clicking through to your various profiles and which sites are driving traffic through to your ID.

Another powerful statistic allows you to see which services are being used by (and therefore are most relevant to) your contacts. This is useful because it allows you to focus your social media efforts to more efficiently engage with your contacts on the services that they are using.

These analytic tools are useful, but I’d like to have it easier to access — a daily summary email or RSS notification would be great.

Overall, I am tremendously impressed with the DandyID service. I’m also excited by the opportunities that more widespread adoption of it could bring.

How do you bring all your Social Web IDs together and manage them?

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But first, some basics. You are being Googled. If you haven’t done so lately, do a vanity search and try to objectively assess the impression people will get when they see the results. Who’s Googling you? Potential partners (of the love and work variety), clients, investors…all kinds of people are doing a quick background check on you. As a professional, what you want to accomplish with your image is credibility. You want those search results to show that you know what you’re doing. This is true whether you’re an artist, a dog groomer, a developer or a wedding planner.

What It Is

Image is unavoidable. If you have an online presence, people are making assumptions and forming opinions about you. They’re putting you into categories. It’s what people do. The conclusion they reach constitutes your image, whether you like it or not.

Maybe you don’t care. Not caring is certainly an option. But if you’re a professional, and I’m assuming you are if you’re reading this, you should probably care.

Image is like a shirt. Every morning you get up and pick out clothes that will be appropriate for what you’re going to do and who you’re going to see that day. So you just have to decide if the “online you” that you present is a guy in flip-flops with two days of stubble, or a well-groomed guy in a smart suit, or something in between. And you can have an “off-duty online you” and a “professional online you,” no problem! It doesn’t hurt someone’s image to seem like a well-rounded, multifaceted person.

What It Isn’t (Or Shouldn’t Be)

Image shouldn’t be artificial. A lot of people seem to have that ickiness reaction because they perceive that a personal brand is something like a fake facade. But the general consensus is that you have to be genuine in this day and age. So, just be yourself. Or, more accurately, your image should reflect the parts of your self that you want to show the world. If your image is a fabrication, people will figure it out eventually, so honesty is the best policy.

A Definition of Branding

Wikipedia offers this definition of branding:

People engaged in branding seek to develop or align the expectations behind the brand experience, creating the impression that a brand associated with a product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique.

Clearly, the image you project online serves a similar purpose. As a professional, you want to have some control over people’s opinion of who you are and what you do. And you want them to get the impression that you and what you do are in some way special. You can accomplish this without artifice, so what’s the problem?

Image Is a Societal and Business Reality

These days, with more and more big companies putting on a human face, and more and more people parlaying their personalities into companies (think Gary Vaynerchuk), the line between business branding and personal branding is becoming blurred. For these reasons, it’s especially important for people who run a one-man-show or a little shop, which many of us do, to consider the issue of personal branding seriously.

This is the first in a series of posts about personal branding/image that we’ll be publishing here on WebWorkerDaily, presenting both sides of the argument.What do you think about personal branding/image?

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Thus, there are a number of sites that are intended to help put all of your online presences in one place. I’ve tried a few of these aggregators. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so check them out, and see which options might work for you.

DandyID

Of the services I discuss here, DandyID is the easiest to set up, because it doesn’t try to do too much. This is a simple service that creates an online profile showing your name, bio, contact information, web links, and your online identities. You can specify your online identity for over 330 social networks, including sites from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Poland. Plus, you can add sites not on its list.

When you first sign up, DandyID has an option for importing contacts from services like Gmail, although the import failed for me, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to try again. I’m not sure what advantage you get from importing your contacts, anyway.

The profile page DandyID creates is very basic and not very customizable. But Facebook users may choose DandyID because it offers a very nice app that allows you to embed your online presences into your Facebook page.

Retaggr

Retaggr bills itself as “the modern day equivalent of a business card.” Aliza wrote about this service last year, and noted how it had improved a few months later.

When you sign up, you’re taken to a well-designed form where you provide Retaggr with information about yourself, and about the places you have online presences. I counted over 180 different social networks, and you can add sites not listed. (Apparently, you can import some of this information if you have a FriendFeed account, but that option didn’t work for me.) You can also add information about groups with which you are affiliated, and widgets allowing people to IM you directly.

You get three ways of displaying the information you’ve entered:

• A profile page on the Retaggr site (and which can be used with a custom domain name if you buy its premium service). The page can be set to display your status from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries and even pictures from Flickr.
• A virtual “business card” that can be embedded almost anywhere on the web, and in email signatures.
• An “add me” button that can be used to encourage others to connect with you.

ClaimID

While you can use ClaimID to list your profiles on social networks, the site is really about aggregating any web page or site that you wish to “claim,” either as author or subject. This is done by adding MicroID code to the web pages in question to show you have access to them.

So instead of offering you a list of social networks, as DandyID and Retaggr do, ClaimID offers a “Post to ClaimID” bookmarklet that you install in your browser, then click it whenever you want to add a site to your ClaimID page. You can then organize the links into categories and annotate them as you wish.

This site might be a good way for, say, writers or web developers to put together a portfolio, although if you don’t need ownership verification, it would be easy to produce a similar-looking site with basic web page editing tools.

GizaPage

As Scott discussed recently, GizaPage‘s concept is simple: One URL displays a series of tabs showing the social network sites you select. Web developers will recognize that this is essentially a “Web 2.0″ version of HTML frames, with options that allow the GizaPage owner to select who gets to see what. I like the concept, but the site seems often to be slow and buggy for me. But it has potential, and is definitely worth watching.

Chi.mp

By far the most comprehensive option for managing online identities is Chi.mp, which Darrell recently wrote about. Read his review for details; I’ll just say that Chi.mp offers many options that none of the above services do, notably:

• A custom domain name as a standard feature (optional with Retaggr).
• The ability to show different information to public, work and home groups.
• Some customization of the site’s template.
• Twitter-like posting of status and images.
• Contact management (Chi.mp calls it the “Ultimate Black Book”).

Because Chi.mp has so many features, it takes more setting up than the other options, and, I suspect, more maintenance. But it may be an attractive option for those who need a hub for their web presences, and are willing to spend the time to use its features to the fullest.

Conclusion

There are a number of other services for aggregating social network identities. Many of these products are in beta, or just don’t seem to work very well. I’ve tried a few, and will hold my opinions until we see how they develop. Like the social networking field itself, I’m sure that the best services will survive, and others will fade away.

For now, though, I found Retaggr to be the most useful service for managing online identities, although signing up for DandyID may be worth it just for the Facebook app.

How do you manage your social identities?

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One of the challenges is that the connections I’ve made through one service have a hard time finding me on the others. GizaPage, a new service launching in beta today, hopes to make that process easier.

When you sign up for GizaPage, you get a customizable URL (for example, mine is scottblitstein.gizapage.com) which can serve as a dashboard of sorts for all of your online profiles. Currently supporting over 40 services, you pin your accounts together to create a virtual catalog of your online presence. Connections can browse through your tabs to see where else you are active.

GizaPage isn’t an aggregator in the traditional sense. Unlike something like FriendFeed, which pulls your updates from the various sites it supports, GizaPage lets people view your full profile pages in a convenient tabbed environment.

The tabbed interface is also a convenient way for me as a user to be able to easily access all of the profiles I’ve added from one place.

One of the most compelling features of GizaPage is the built-in privacy controls. You can establish a public profile but then also include, or pin, additional profiles that are only viewable to those that you have connected with. Also, because you are just presenting your publicly available profiles from the various sites you use, there is no need to share your login information with GizaPage.

The process of connecting with friends was a bit odd, though. I was given the option of importing my contacts from Gmail, for example, but it never really told me what it was going to do with that info. I imagine it will show me if any of those folks have a page of their own, but a bit more help and information during the import process would be helpful.

The concept of personal branding is a hot topic right now. A well-populated GizaPage could be a good compliment to Google’s recent Profile enhancements. My GizaPage profile isn’t yet showing up in a Google search, but as the service is adopted by more people, its search ranking will likely improve over time.

Creating a GizaPage is currently free, but expect an option for premium services to be available in the future.

How do you maintain your online personal brand?

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