Should you create your profile on multiple Social Network ?

New Social Network platform appears almost every week. Many of the new players are exploring niches or offer alternatives to the major players like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn. Not to mention ClaimID or Naimz that are around for claiming your online identity.

Doppelganger.name published several interesting articles (in French) around online reputation and managing online identity.

The question covered in this article is Simple: Shall I setup a profile on multiple Social Network platforms?

Here is a scenario: You have your friends and professional from real life: IRL contacts (In Real Life). At some point you will create a profile by yourself to invite your friends or being invited from your friends. Here you go you know have a profile on 1 social network on FaceBook. Later you will have an opportunity to connect to a colleague. But he will invite you on LinkedIn. What shall you do? Refuse because the invite came from a different social network platform? Likely not. And here you go you have 2 profiles. Soon or later you will have an invite from MySpace then from Naimz then from Viadeo, then for … ok you’ve got the picture.

Having multiple profiles is not wrong. However you need to realise that a certain level of consistency should exist between the profiles.

The social network platforms bring you a value by maintaining a certain level of contact with your connections. This means investing a bit of time for maintaining the info from your profileS, and obviously some time spent on communication with your connections.

Here is where the bottleneck is: maintaining your profiles and the communication with your connections.

The more profile you have the more time you will need to maintain your profile. The more social network platform you use for communications the more time it will cost you.

How can you get around this?

My view is that you shall concentrate on maintaining your profile with details on 1 or 2 platforms. You might have more profile on other platforms but you shall only provide the bear minimum information into them and create a reference back to the profiles you are maintaining with details. This allows creating visibility in various platforms while maintaining a minimum of information.

Tell me what your view is on this?

Classifying the data that build your online presence.

On Internet, many data exist that contribute to your Online Identity and your Online Reputation.

I believe that 4 types of data build your online presence.

1. The profile data that you provide on various platforms such as a user profile in a forum or your Facebook account, etc. These data will subsequently be partly available to everyone or to a limited number of people.
2. The contents that you publish as an author (like this blog), as a contributor into a publication (co-writing) or as a commenter on top of an existing content.
3. The indirect content that refers to your content (those from category 1). It is usually comments or contributions from others that refers to your writing and provide their view about your saying/writing.
4. The indirect profile information that your online friends write about you.

I intentionally discard all the data that are automatically generated and collected by external parties about your online activities (cookies, logging, etc). Why? Because by default they are not published to the crowd and so doesn’t fall under the 4 categories described above. As soon as they are published then they wouldfall under category 3 or 4. Michel Bénart, in the comments, proposed to group them as a fith category, the “grey data”, and I buy to his idea. The definition of it is:

…data collected during your online activity by third parties through cookies, beacons, and log connexions, to build your marketing profile…

What is your view on this data categorization ?

Doppelganger.name (French site) published a couple of articles that approach Online Identity and Online Reputation.

Here is how I woud map the 4 types 5 types of data. Online Identity is made of type 1. Online Reputation is made of type 3 and 4. I’m puzzled where to put type 2 and my god feel says Online Reputation. Type 5, being the grey data, are not strictly speaking visible Online Identity or visible Online Reputation.

Tell me what you think about this.

Misleading search results when googling somebody

Nowadays, searching information about somebody on Internet has become a standard practice. Internet user names it googling.

In that context, search engine returns a set of hits that match the individual you are googling and, for each hit, it displays an excerpt of the page where that individual’s name shows.

Let’s focus on the results pointing to comments left by the googled individual on the various blogs he has visited.

I noticed that there are 2 kinds of layouts when it comes to comments in blogs:

1. the first line that describes who is the author; then the comment itself.

2. the comment first; then the last line that describes who is the author.

Now how does that impact googling?

For all the blogs that use layout 1, the search results will show the first words of what the individual actually wrote.

But for all the blogs that use layout 2, the search results will show the description of the person and the first words of the next comment (which is very likely to be from a different person).

So limiting your readings on the search result excerpts can be misleading on what the googled individual actually wrote. This could lead to unwanted impacts on the e-reputation for that individual. The reader is likely to set his opinion based on what he sees in the search results before potentially clicking on search result link and read more about what the individual actually wrote.

“Ok, so what ?”, would you say.

Well … Think now about that googled individual being you…

Are you ready to google your name to see if this applies to you?