Social Media and Identity
Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 01:47PM 
Social networking web sites aren’t just for kids anymore. More businesses, not-for-profits, universities, and organizations are taking advantage of a new breed of social websites to better communicate with their stakeholders. Can your organization utilize these web sites, all of which are free, as a part of your communication strategy?
If you don’t already have a social profile of some sort, chances are you’ve at least heard of a few social and business networking sites. www.facebook.com, www.myspace.com, www.linkedin.com, www.twitter.com are a few of the popular ones. Sites like Facebook and MySpace were initially dominated by a young audience (teens to early twenties). Times have changed and now, according to the Facebook-focused blog All Facebook 21% of Facebook’s active users are over 35 years old.
The success of social networking sites notwithstanding, the question still remains: how relevant are these sites to your organization’s communication strategy? Simply put, social media provides an easy interface to create a web identity or ‘persona’ for yourself and for your organization.
What is a web persona?
A web persona is simply a home for your organization on a social networking site. Twitter and Facebook allow you to easily create a branded profile on their service that includes a descriptive bio and logo. These profiles become your organization’s persona online by letting people know that there is a real person behind the organization, and provides you with better networking capabilities.
You may decide you want to have a picture or avatar associated with your persona. It should be a high-quality, high resolution image that will be associated with your company, like a logo. You should also include a bio about your organization that explains what you do now, what you aspire to do, and what type of people and organizations you are interested in networking with.
Why is a web persona important?
A web persona is important because it makes your organization more accessible. You want users to find your organization everywhere when they search for you. The more places you pop up, the more memorable you are, and thus there will be more traffic to your website.
Sites we use for our web persona
After my post last week on Twitter several of you started following us there. Twitter is a great place for your web persona to develop. We also recently started a Facebook Page for our blog posts.
A Facebook page is not the same as a Facebook profile. Profiles are for individuals, Pages are for organizations. Our page lists information about our company and also pulls all of our blog posts onto the page via an RSS feed. Maintaining profiles on social networks doesn’t mean more work. You can import an RSS feed directly into your facebook to syndicate your blog posts. Blog plugins like Twittpress allow you to automatically post a status update on Twitter when you have a new blog post.
Security Issues
Establishing your online identity is also important in protecting the reputation you have on the web. If you do not establish an online identity you may be more susceptible to what is known as “identity hijacking” A victim of identity hijacking may find unflattering information about him/herself or his/her business on the web or they may find someone is impersonating them for personal gain.
In this ReadWriteWeb article security firm Aladdin, issued their Annual Threat Report which claims “if you don’t own and control your online persona, it’s relatively easy for a criminal to aggregate the known public information about you in order to create a fake one.” Essentially, you should establish your online persona is several networks so someone else cannot, believably, attempt to impersonate you.
Reader Feedback
What types of social media are you familiar with? Which do you like best? Which do you like least? For a future blog post, which issue covered in this piece would you like to know more about?
Reader Comments (3)
Great Article,
Do you ever find that there is blending of personal and professional life that falls into a sticky gray area? Meaning, if you are the identity behind your organization, should you operate in strictly business mode? Following that statement, is there some value in being a little more personable? An example would be send out a tweet about the awesome sushi that you had for lunch, versus dropping headlines and scholarly articles into your micro blog.
Chelsea, I've used Facebook and Twitter. I signed up for Linkedin once but never used it. I think Twitter is great, but I haven't really figured out how to use Facebook yet. I didn't know about pages. The company I work for is gigantic and seems like it is run by people from the 50's It takes an act of god to get anything new done, especially around Web 2.0.
Thanks to Greg & Stephen for commenting.
To answer your question Greg, yes I do believe there is gray area as to personal life and business life blending together. It's an area in which one must proceed with extreme caution.
Take for instance this twitter catastrophe that ensued when an Ad Agency representative made a negative twitter comment about Memphis, Tennessee where he was meeting with his client, FedEx.
One of FedEx's employees saw the offending tweet made by the Ad Rep, James Andrews, and took it upon himself to email the higher ups at FedEx and Andrews' superiors as well about Andrews' gaffe.
If this tweet had been directed toward Mr. Andrews' immediate social circle it would likely be passed of as an offhanded comment and probably never would have got him in hot water with his employer and his client. Since his twitter updates were not protected (protected= seen only to approved followers, and do not appear in Google searches) he got slammed for his mistake.
I think that individuals and businesses should have separate social accounts. readMedia and this blog have a Facebook Page that I am a "Facebook Fan" of but my Facebook profile and the Page are two separate entities. My facebook profile is more casual in nature and is visible only to my approved list of friends- who I accept only if I have actually met the person.
Twitter also has the ability to protect (privatize) your posts which keeps them out of Google searches and they can only be viewed by users that you approve. If your Twitter account is unprotected, you could absolutely still use it for social reasons (ex: "meeting the boys at the pub") but you would want to use discretion to keep yourself out of trouble