Reassessing My Online Profile Part 3

Read these first:

Reassessing my online profile:http://padajo.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/who-am-i/

Reassessing my online profile:http://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/reassessing-my-online-profile-part-2/

Before we start…

I’m not trying to be narcissistic here and tell you all how great (or otherwise) I am. This is just a series of posts that have come out of my experiences being online and trying to run a business.

What’s my situation now?

I’ve partially resurrected my business over the past few months after having zero joy with getting another job after losing my first proper job for 8 years (after running my business for 8 years – not being a slacker) in January.

The reason I couldn’t get another job? Simple – I’m too experienced. Now, I’m not just saying that to make myself look better, it’s the responses I was getting from prospects. Apparently, I’m too experienced (and therefore likely to move on quickly) to take on a job in a marketing agency lower than senior management level (which I’ve done) and not able to be a senior consultant in an IT consultancy, because my skills are too “varied”.  What is frustrating is that I’m perfectly capable of doing both these jobs (having done them both as a contractor many times in the last 8 years).

So I’ve had to develop my own opportunities and as far as new business development is concerned, I’ve found that Social Media is a great term (er… buzzword) to start a conversation with people who need web and marketing skills. I’ve got a few new clients, including some large charities all wishing to utilise my Social Media knowledge and skills, but I’ve also found that most of the time, it takes a few hours, or a couple of days to tell them most of what they need to know to do it themselves.

The one big client I do have (at least, big for me) is a startup for whom i’m building an interactive online classroom.  Great work, but hugely frustrating trying to complete it.

My Profile Online – What’s changed?

I’ve actually stopped a lot of interaction on Social Networks over the summer – mainly because it’s the summer, and I have a family, but also because of holidays and moving house. It’s caused me to really think about how much time I spend online and for what purpose.

I’ve adapted my thinking on what I get out of being online. As far as business is concerned, almost all of my work still comes offline from face to face networking and from existing relationships. In fact, I can’t think of a single piece of work from this last 9 months that has come from either an existing relationship (not online) or through new relationships via offline networking.

So… is Online really that important?

Well, now comes the contradiction. It is important to be engaged and developing online networks. Why? Well, I think it is much more to enhance and develop relationships that are created offline (certainly for me).

The users I follow on twitter (for example – my twitter is @pauldjohnston) are generally in these categories:

• people I know as friends
• people I have met at some form of offline networking event (e.g. tweetups, trade shows, networking events, barcamps)
• people who interest me (could be celebrities or just people that have @ replied with something interesting)
• journalists and news/content organisations

As you can see, the first two are people I’ve met, and the last two are generally not.  The ones I take the most notice of are the first two and the last one.  The interesting people I can dip in and out of, but I’m generally not too bothered what they say.

How does this make me reassess my online profile?

As I have stated before, I’m desperate to setup another startup (have done 3 – all failed – learned loads – pretty sure I know what makes a great startup now). However, now is a rubbish time to try and do that (whatever anyone says) and having no consistent work for 9 months means there is no resource buffer to try and develop something new.

I am having to rethink why I blog/tweet (not how much). I’ve realised that just getting involved in conversations, whilst fun and interesting, doesn’t always help me get my work done. So maybe I need to learn about Getting Things Done and productivity tools, but they’re only useful if I actually have a business to work on.

So, the crux of the issue is me

What it comes down to is that if I tweet/blog and comment, people interact, and if I don’t do those things, my interaction reduces significantly (and generally only a handful of people still interact).  I have to figure out Who I Am before social media can really help me to develop a business or any othe form of relationships.  Maybe I won’t ever figure out Who I Am though, and maybe that’s the point. The journey is much more important than the answer.

Well that’s just great! I’m pretty much back where I started a year ago!  It seems that my next step must be looking after the clients I’ve got and coming up with a business idea that I can take to market.

Then, just maybe, you’ll start to see more of the real more on social media.

The Perfect Microsite… is now Social

I was reading this post:

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2009/04/death-microsite-act-4/

and was wondering why anyone thinks that Microsites are anything useful anyway. Most microsites exist to support a campaign and are temporary anyway.  The fact is that I don’t like them because they generally support an expensive marketing campaign and are essentially identikit anyway.  They’ll have some cool content, they’ll “hero” a brand and then there’ll be a “register” and a “send to a friend” type of thing.

Microsites have been dead a long time – Agencies just don’t know it

The thing that always amused me about microsites was how they generated traffic from all the wrong people. A large proportion of the traffic was from workers/friends at other agencies wondering what the agency that built it had just done. A large other part of the traffic was from those who received the campaign anyway, and so weren’t new customers.

Microsites start in the wrong place

Basically, social networks make the rules change so significantly, that Microsites become much less important (unless you are still working to the same metrics as 10 years ago – Hint: they’ve changed!).  It’s far more about who the audience is than what you are trying to promote.

Microsites (or their replacement) must now be social.What that means is yet to be understood as nobody has yet done a highly successful social campaign yet.  When it does, all I hope is that agencies don’t just do their usual “copy and screw it up” routine.

Marketing costs will reduce, Community Consulting will Increase

This is the key. The world will change to be much more about who your community is and where they talk, rather than trying to setup “microsites” which are at best temporary and at worst a celebration of how much money an agency can make out of a stupid company just for some old style print design on the web.

Community is now so important that it cannot be ignored. Most of the major companies are aware of this, but it changes marketing into a much more conversational activity. It’s not even about permission to talk to me, as I now have an expectation of a conversation with any brands.

How do you manage community?

Psychology and Sociology are far more important in marketing now than they ever were. Maybe the key people are not techies or designers any more, but those that are able to understand people and the business models of a client. It’s a very different world.

Arguing about communities

A twitter conversation between me and (mostly) Prokofy Neva

paul: thinking: You are a product of the communities you inhabit

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet hell no, not me : )

garethj: @pjnet Communities are defined by the people that inhabit them

paul: @garethj communities self-perpetuate types of people

paul: @Prokofy those communities may require you to be belligerent and annoying to others in the community – it’s a “type”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet does it make you feel innovative and clever to typecast people?

paul: @Prokofy – you’re arguing my point about communities in http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=189…

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I simply don’t believe in prescribing Social Darwinism for others, imagining up little deterministic scenarios for “communities”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet most of the time, there isn’t even any such thing as a “community.”

paul: @Prokofy you are the kind of person that encourages people to find out about stuff

paul: @Prokofy not sure what you’re getting at – I think you’re confusing my thoughts with something else

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, I’m responding directly to your your tweets. You said people r defined by communities. I say, no, they aren’t & they don’t exist.

paul: @Prokofy communities don’t exist? People are defined by the communities they inhabit – it’s a choice which communities we join

paul: @Prokofy even an anarchist is part of a community no?

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no? I realize that’s just awfully clever, gosh, you are a product of what you rebel against but no, I’m not a social Darwinist they pretend that they create, empower, link, blah blah “communities”. They don’t. It’s a vast fiction -fake friends list isn’t a community.

paul: thinking that lots of people can’t see the other part of this twittering about

paul: @Prokofy you choose what you believe – you choose what you follow – i haven’t mentioned social darwinism at all

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I absolutely refute any such determinist and all-encompassing notion of human nature, as “dictated by its community”

paul: @Prokofy I’m not just talking about online though – in fact, the thought came from thinking about offline communities

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet this is one of the deep, deep, corporativist, nay, fascistic fallies of Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky’s group fetishizing and groupism

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet they would have you defined online as always and everywhere “in a group” that grooms and conforms you to norms. No thanks!

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, you just practice it : )

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, that’s just your doctrine. People aren’t defined merely or even especially by communities. Many other factors are at play.

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet it’s a basic tenet of the Western liberal idea that the individual is unique and free and not subject to these restrictions

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet but I do realize that you simply don’t believe this; you may not even understand it.

paul: @Prokofy blog your thinking and I’ll comment

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I just did : )

paul: thinking that it’s far easier to be rude and unsociable if you’re an avatar and hiding your true identity

paul: @prokofy We don’t live in isolation. We all live in communities. All different. All individual. Soc. Darwinism is about conformism – th …

paul: @prokofy link to the blog post? Haven’t yet seen it

paul: pjnet enjoying being challenged by @prokofy

I just found this a bit weird. It was an off-the-cuff thought that I was musing over, and the conversation got hijacked and rude very fast.

The conversation was interesting though. There’s a wikipedia page on Social Darwinism.

I do think however that we are changed by the communities we interact with. It’s all about which communities we choose to be a part of.  They can be big or small, and can have big or small influences. But you can’t be a part of a community without being changed in some way by it.