BTVSMD – Burlington Social Media Managing your Digital Identity – Dr Elaine Young

Managing your Digital Identity

This presentation was made at Burlington’s Social Media day by Dr Elaine Young, Digital and Social Media Marketing Professor at The Stiller School of Business at Champlain College

Every piece of content on social media is used to market
Why manage?
79% recruiters screen social media – Pinterest infographic
86% reject due to things posted to social media
7 out of 10 people have searched online for people
80 % LinkedIn, 50% Facebook, 45% Twitter to find talent for their business
14.4 million people have found jobs by social media

Building brand
Simple steps = big result
Set goal and objective
Assess current online ecosystem – how it can relay info about you, both personally and professionally
“Ego search” on Google – search for your own name
Prioritize tools you use
Create a content plan with strong keywords for each tool
Implement your plan
Measure and monitor results

Examples:
Brandyourself.com infographic
Gives you a breakdown of person’s Google search result, 3 URLs for free, then pay
Colleges have given this for their students to improve their brand
1 billion name searches a day, 94% of people only look at first page of results
2% own the first page results, 1 in 4 people have no positive content at all, 15% have 1 negative result on first page, which damages reputation
Google results are skewed if you’re logged into your own social media networks, but selecting the Hide private results feature shows unbiased search results.

For First page:
LinkedIn is king, WordPress for blog – Best of blogs, Vimeo better than YouTube due to professional appeal
About.me is ok, but Zerply and Brand Yourself rank more, 2 points higher in result,
Also co-founder of Brand Yourself is Stu McGowan’s son – local Burlington connection
Flickr best for photographers – create professional Flickr site

Branding Examples: build you personal brand in 15 weeks – Champlain College student assignment
(following are Champlain College student examples):

• Nikki Tetreault
• Brittany Leaning – uses same user name on almost all sites
• Hans Bardenheuer
• Nicole Magoon – slideshare.net
• Elaine Young

MySpace – revisit your profile, as they have had a major overhaul of the system
Possibly get off Facebook, as it’s moving in new direction
Check Facebook settings as often as smoke detectors, as they change frequently

Question:
Finding old articles online? – search for the unique terms, save article as PDF, and archive your work

Another tip:

• Setup Google alerts for your name/brand
• Socialmention – Real-time social media search and analysis

This was one of the five of the eight seminars for Burlington’s Social Media day on June 2 7th, 2013 that the Advantage Creations staff attended. More notes to follow, keep posted.