Is it possible to have two identities?

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Okay, so this may seem like a weird title and topic for a social media blog…but by “identities” I mean online identities.

Do you think it’s possible to have two online identities?

What do I mean?

The web is a huge place; you can either be yourself or an idealised version of yourself. But is it possible to do both? I believe, to a certain extent, that it is possible. I think you can use the internet for both being yourself (personal) and creating an idealised version of yourself, in this case, a professional “version” of you (a version that is heavily censored/monitored/edited).

The internet allows you to portray yourself as whoever you want to be, meaning you’re able to ONLY post things online that you want others to see. You can, for example, post edited images of yourself onto your Instagram profile – which would give your followers a certain impression – you decide the impression you want to give. YOU choose what people see/think.

It is easy enough to post pictures on Facebook of the night before, but would you want a professional who may potentially hire you to see your drunken pictures?
It’s easy enough to use Facebook privacy settings to stop these from being seen, but it isn’t always easy monitoring, editing and changing articles, websites etc. you may have been signed up to when you were younger – all these things can be found in a Google search (of your name) which will (most likely) be found by a future employer.

What can you do?

What can you do to ensure that your past profiles, etc. are invisible to a prospective employer? Well, first things first DELETE THEM. But, what do you do if you’ve forgotten your Myspace password, for example? Or if you’ve got a profile on a website that won’t allow you to delete that  profile?
If you can’t delete your profile then DETACH it from you. For example, change the email address (if possible), change your name on the profile so it’s made up…change ALL of your details so that the profile can no longer be associated with you.

Even though it’s hard to maintain two online identities it’s possible, however it’s (in my opinion) impossible to stop these two identities from overlapping…after all it’s YOUR name attached to both ‘identities’.

You just have to bare in mind that – you shouldn’t post anything on the internet that you’d be ashamed of, or embarrassed by. Only post things to the internet if you’re happy to post them. After all, you don’t have to put EVERYTHING about you online – YOU CHOOSE what you put out there about yourself. If it’s out there then it’ll be found.

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Second Year!

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I’M BACK!

I MADE IT TO SECOND YEAR OF UNIVERSITY!!! I’m sorry I haven’t been active over summer, well since finishing my last year of Uni; I’ve been super busy and I just haven’t had anything worth blogging about. But, I’m back and will try to blog soon for you…some more useful Social Media related posts which I know you all love. Is there anything in particular you’ve got in mind or ANYTHING SM? Let me know in the comments if you have anything in mind or if you’d like to raise a SM issue/point to me. It always helps if I get suggestions then I can try develop your ideas and help you guys solve any problems you may have. No, I’m no professional but I can, for example, figure out how to use something in order to help others. I usually get the biggest response from blog posts which are, of course, informative and helpful to you all…so I do listen to what you all want to read because afterall I enjoy writing content that you’ll enjoy….although I have to enjoy writing about it – otherwise that’d be no fun!!

Anyways, I’ll finish rambling because this post was basically a post to let you know IM BACK! 🙂
BUT, before I go a question for you all to think about or reply to in the comments: do you think data/multi-media/content/status’ etc. which you publish onto the internet could be used against you?

Legend Robin Williams Dies

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so social media was all swamped with the news of the death of this legend the other day.
RIP Robin Williams…he will truly be missed, his films were some of my favourites and he was a funny man. But it just goes to show we all have our demons.
RIP

The Daily Binge

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Robin Williams has committed suicide.

The comedian killed himself in Tiburon, in Northern California.

According to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office … authorities found William’s body inside his home. They say he was found unresponsive.

He was unconscious and not breathing and the coroner suspects suicide due to asphyxia.

Williams was last seen alive at his house at 10 PM Sunday night.

Williams went back to rehab last month to focus on his sobriety. We’re told alcohol was an issue.

Williams struggled with cocaine and alcohol abuse in the early ’80s but was sober for 20 years.

Williams was 63.

Great Actor, R.I.P.

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‘How I built a social media network in eight months’

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How I built a social media network in eight months

By Gene’O Gordon

Last summer, I started discussing the possibility of setting up a collaborative blog with a few friends. Over the course of three or four months, my sister, Diana, signed on and we went from talking to planning to designing blogs. We kicked off three WordPress blogs in November. We decided that if we were going blog we wanted real audiences. We didn’t want to put the time and energy into maintaining blogs if they were only going to be read by a dozen of our friends. We decided the way to do that was to build a cross-platform social media network.

The problem with that was, we didn’t have a very large social media presence. Most of us were only active on Facebook with 150 or so followers each at that point, with a handful of other social media accounts we hadn’t used in years. We’ve come a long way since November. Our success hasn’t been stellar in terms of daily page views, but we’re making steady progress, and our readers are very engaged, so we’re pleased and we feel like our effort has been worth it so far.

We experimented with at least nine different social media networks during the early months, and we’ve reached the point where we have an idea what works for us and what doesn’t. I’ll explain in this post how we use various social media networks and why we use them the way we do. I’m ranking them in order of their value to me. I think they can all be valuable if you can figure out how to use them and find people to engage with on them; this is just the way I rank them.

WordPress is the heart of our network, because we’re content-producers first and foremost. This is where we publish, and we strive to update three blogs at least once a day. We chose WordPress mainly for the easy pingbacks, tagging system, and ease of publicizing to other networks.

Twitter is valuable, but not for the page views it brings. It’s valuable because it’s public, it’s a good place to interact with other bloggers without having to load pages, and the character limit means you can never ask a question and get back a three-paragraph response that you must read before the conversation can continue. Twitter was difficult to figure out, but I understand how to grow a Twitter account from zero followers into the thousands now, and figuring it out was worth the effort.

StumbleUpon is an enigma to us, but it is potentially the most valuable source of page views we’ve encountered. It’s a bookmark-sharing service that allows you to add web pages to topic indexes. We don’t understand the etiquette or the ranking system yet, so we aren’t able to use StumbleUpon to get consistent traffic yet, but we’ve pulled hundreds of views in a single day from StumbleUpon several times now.

Facebook is the most difficult network I’ve encountered in terms of getting attention. We have fan pages for our blogs, but they don’t do much. I think we’ll have to package content specifically for Facebook and focus on one of our fan pages to build a big one, and we don’t have the time for that at the moment. The value of Facebook for me as a blogger, for the time being, is in the multi-user chat and discussion group features. It’s great for coordinating.

Pinterest is valuable primarily because it gives us an easy way to curate images, which can later be embedded on our blogs. It’s saved us tons of time searching for art to illustrate posts. We’re working on integrating it more thoroughly into our plan, and thinking about building boards with some of our best blog posts on them.

We also have a Tumblr page that all three blogs update to, but we’ve had limited success with it because we haven’t put the time and effort into networking on Tumblr. I think Tumblr could work very well as a blogging platform, but I’m not sure it’s very good for attracting WordPress readers.

We’ve also experimented with Google Plus and Linked In. I hid most of my G+ profile a few months ago because it started to feel like an identity risk, and I rarely look at my feed there these days. We don’t connect our Linked In accounts to our blogs, because our Linked In networks are loaded with colleagues and professional acquaintances, and that’s not an appropriate audience for the type of blogging we do. I’m looking at Reddit, but only looking for the moment.

At this point, we’re mostly focused on WordPress, Twitter, and StumbleUpon because those are the places that have shown the most promise for mass communication. The others are either on cruise control for the time being or are used in very specific ways.

Gene’O runs the blog Sourcerer and contributes to Part Time Monster.

You can also follow Gene’O on Twitter

Stumbleupon as a marketing tool?

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A lot of people use social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to increase traffic to their blog, and to basically market their blog. Stumbleupon may be unknown to a few people, but if you’re into social media I’m assuming that you’ll have AT LEAST heard of Stumbleupon.
I’ve been thinking for the past week “what could my next blog post be?” and it occurred to me that I don’t, 100%, know what Stumbleupon is, so I thought I’d do a little research, find out what other people are saying and see what you think to it…have you used Stumbleupon? If not, maybe you’re like me and don’t really know what Stumbleupon’s purpose is. Well if you want to know, keep reading…

What is Stumbleupon?

It’s both a social bookmarking tool and a social voting tool.

Stumbleupon allows you to save (bookmark) the links to pages which you like, which is similar to other online bookmarking tools such as Pocket, Instapaper and Delicious.

Also it allows you to either thumbs up or thumbs down articles, if you like an article you are randomly shown when you press the “stumble” button you can hit the ‘thumbs up’ button, if you don’t like the article then you can hit ‘thumbs down’.

How to use Stumbleupon?

Go to www.stumbleupon.com

Sign up for free and what interests you – this will help Stumbleupon to find articles of interest to you

It’s that simple, then you can ‘start stumbling’.

 

I have shared my blog posts on Stumbleupon and have found that I have gained quite a bit of traffic, so it’s definitely a good marketing tool.

BUT could it be the next big thing in the marketing world? …I don’t know about that. I just don’t quite get it.

I will continue researching about Stumbleupon, researching how other bloggers/marketers are using Stumbleupon to promote themselves and I’ll get back to you with a “how to use Stumbleupon as a marketing tool” type post, or something similar.

Let me know if you’ve used Stumbleupon or point me in the right direction – let me know how you use stumbleupon as a marketing tool.

As always I enjoy hearing your thoughts and hearing about what methods for marketing you do.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to guest blog for

————————————————–

Stay tuned to my blog as my next blog post will be done by a guest blogger..

Follow me on my social media, if you don’t already:

Is Social Media shaping our lives?

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I may be younger than most social media bloggers, marketing bloggers etc. but this doesn’t affect they way I view social media…and the internet.

People tend to assume that the ‘younger generation’ have grown up with the internet and so think of it as the norm, which it is now, and just haven’t known anything different..which obviously is true in the case of people born in the last 10 years or so.
But, in my life time (I’m 19 years old) I can remember the dial-up tone, not being able to use the phone and internet at the same time. So although I may be part of the “younger generation” I still stop and wonder ‘what would our lives be like if we didn’t have the internet…and of course; social media‘

I MOST DEFINITELY believe our lives would be drastically different. But would it be better?
Of course there are obvious things the internet allows us to do, like being able to converse with people living at the other side of the world easily, or publishing this blog post. The internet has opened up a whole new world of possibilities, even job roles and opportunities.

BUT do I think the internet is shaping our lives?
In a way yes because we are heavily reliant on the internet, much of what we do now involves the internet.
On the other hand, no; because we are (or should be) an active audience and so should be actively making decisions, not allowing things we see or read on the internet to influence the things we do. But it’s inevitable that this happens, of course it does.

What are your thoughts?
Is Social media shaping our lives??

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THANK YOU!

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          Thank you to everyone who has read my blog, who follows me and interacts with me. It means the world that I have ALREADY hit the 200 follower milestone. It might not seem a lot … Continue reading →

New Facebook Column Ads: This Week in Social Media

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socialmediabizuk

Welcome to our weekly edition of what s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What s New This Week? New Facebook Column Ads Roll Out: Designed to give advertisers a more engaging creative canvas, while also offering […]This post New Facebook Column Ads: This Week in Social Media first appeared on Social Media Examiner. Social Media Examiner – Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-column-ads/

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