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Managing a Digital Footprint

June 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

This is a guest post written by Alex Shippee, and reproduced from the website for #SMchat.

A “digital footprint” is what your presence on the Internet communicates to those who find it. Google is the usual starting point, but more and more people are using monitoring services or going straight to the big social platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, etc. All of this is becoming a necessity because of one inescapable truth about the Internet Age:

You will be Googled. In fact, you most likely already have been. Family members, co-workers, friends, and employers will all be interested in how you show up on a search engine. And if you are a brand, or have a client who is, then you can add “customers” to that list as well.

© Clare Munn 2008-2011

This isn’t a bad thing. Instead of seeing it as “work,” try to think of it as an “opportunity.” It is common for our clients, some of whom are new to social media, to be concerned about “opening themselves up.” They fear negative comments, or being the victim of a smear campaign by their competitors. The truth is, people are already talking online and it’s not possible to curb it. Choosing not to participate hands all the power to the consumers, or competitors. Instead, you want to fan those flames in the right direction.

One of the most valuable and rewarding elements of the work tcg does is provide their clients with real-time, contextual intelligence by monitoring and analyzing their digital footprint before we start our work. We take it a step further than wanting to know what people are saying about you and reputation management; we turn a digital footprint into a valuable asset.

Managing a digital footprint means taking responsibility and ownership of your brand. You start with the simple steps first and sign up for Twitter or start a blog. Then, you go one step further and decide you want to attach your name, or brand, to good content. From there begins the hustle of growing an audience now that you’re easy for them to find.

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Social Media in a Business Setting: Part Two

July 18, 2008 By 1 Comment

I had intended to talk about social media in a business setting from the point of view of technology, tools and applications. After mulling this over in my head for a few days I realised that I was falling into the trap that so many people fall into. Social media cannot be defined by its technologies. Social Media is a phenomenon. It is about connecting people to each other, be they individuals, organizations or the whole spectrum in-between. It is about learning through collaboration and creating a new social structure to enable this to happen. This is not static: it is changing constantly. These connections are enabled through technology, and so, if we follow this train of thought, the technology and the way we use technology cannot be static either.

At tcg we have two areas of focus, Professional Services and Technology. Both feed each other but stand apart. Our Professional Services really drive our understanding of the phenomenon of social media. It allows us to truly understand each situation from the perspective of our client and the audience, stakeholders or users. We don’t only look at the now, but we look at where they have come from and where they are going.

Our second area of focus is Technology. It became clear to us that technology cannot be produced in isolation. It needs to be relevant, and yet it is not financially or time viable to start from scratch in every engagement. That would be silly. This is why we have created our technology in a modular fashion that can constantly change and adapt. We recognize that technology needs to talk to legacy applications and it needs to be expandable to incorporate new technologies, ones that we have not even thought of yet. Not only do we expect new applications, tools and widgets to become more relevant to a business over time, we also recognize that the business rules and uses of existing tools and applications are going to change. Our clients should be able to effect change quickly, efficiently and without great cost.

A good example of this constant change is to look at the altering landscape of portals we use to connect to each other. We are already seeing a migration of social media away from the exclusivity of computers to mobile and portable devices as well as 10-foot interfaces and other media portals. Can anyone really say that have a technology platform that extends to all these portals? No, because they have not all been defined yet, nor will we ever be at a place where progress will sit still for an hour so we can get the definitions down. What we can say is that we are prepared for this; we know it is happening and we are building our technology to adapt, to integrate and to expand.

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Social Media

July 2, 2008 By 2 Comments

Social Media has everybody talking, but are they all talking about the same thing? Social Media is such a vast subject, with many different nuances, disciplines, approaches and reference points.

What do we use social media for? I asked a sample of people, male and female between the ages of 16 and 40. Here are some of the answers.

  • To share pictures, videos, links and posts with friends.
  • To connect to friends and family.
  • To find out stuff.
  • To keep in touch.
  • For entertainment. Etc.

Perhaps the most interesting answer came from a 16-year-old female. (I will call her Emma)

“I don’t use social media for anything specific. It is not like I set out to use social media, it just exists. It is a part of my life. This is a dumb question. You don’t ask people what they use a telephone for. I could list a thousand instances where I would use a telephone, but really everyone knows that a telephone allows you to talk to people over distances. Well social networking allows you to do this better. It is a fuller experience.”

Emma’s answer makes sense to me. Social media allows us to communicate with people in ways we never thought imaginable. It provides us with easy to use, intuitive tools that cross over multiple learning styles, allowing us to be a part of that communication. We don’t think about how this happens, we just accept it. Providers of these tools think for us. We want to run with these tools from the offset. We accept that it can exist in real time, that we can mix sound with visuals, with text and participate in multiple dialogues. We do not only accept it, we now expect it.

Right? Well, these are our expectation. These expectations are what a handful of social media sites have engrained in us. But this is not always the case. So many social media providers don’t think for their users, they don’t even talk to them. They get fixated in the technology. This is pretty dismal for a discipline that is all about people and communicating. The how is important I agree. There is a need to have world-class technology in order to supply a world-class service, but that technology needs to be applied correctly, with understanding and after dialogue.

When we think social media, we need to think people and connections. If we understand our audience, I mean really understand the audience and then marry that understanding with our objectives, the right technology, applications and tools will follow.

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