Why You Must Capture Your Identity

The purpose of capturing your identity is to ensure that all the branding work you do is protected. You do not want to go through the effort of creating your brand only to find out you are in competition over your brand with someone else or another business. This is especially true on the Internet where many of the rules of business, trademarks, patents, copyrighs, and other legal protections are not well defined or easily pursued. It does not take large amounts of money to register names; so it is wise to do your diligence and register your identity. This is true whether you plan to use the Social Networking service, today, in the future, or maybe never. Do not take unnecessary risks thinking that it will not matter.

Facebook First

Facebook from my experience is the first place you want to establish yourself. There are two reasons: first Facebook currently has the most users and second Facebook is unforgiving and will not allow you to change your name. That does not mean that is a sure fire guarantee, but it is the first place to start looking. If you create a Facebook account or Fan Page (which we will talk more about later) with a name and learn that there is a problem; your only recourse is to delete and start over.

If you are early on in the process and have not gathered many friends or created a significant amount of material it is not a major issue. On the other hand if you have done a lot of work and gathered lots of friends there is a lot of lost effort. If you have to make the change to create your brand it is better to acknowledge it and take the hit earlier rather than later.

When you set up your Facebook Account, your email address is the defining attribute to establish uniqueness. It is highly recommended that you use a personal and not a business email address for this. Using a business address can be problematic when you change jobs. Many sites require a confirmation from the original email address of the change and if you no longer have access to the email account that is a problem. You can probably work it out with Facebook, but I would rather take steps to prevent it from happening in the first place.

After you create your Facebook Account you should capture the name that you want to use for branding your personal account. This is typically your first and last name. Here is where it can get tricky. If you have a common name trying to create that unique moniker can be difficult. Facebook will give you an immediate response if the name is unavailable and may offer some alternative suggestions. Avoid the suggestions and continue trying something that you prefer. You could end up using a nickname, but that should be your last resort.

LinkedIn Second

The second service that I would set up is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the primary professional networking service and therefore important for your personal identity. LinkedIn has about 50 million members and therefore the competition is a little less fierce, but there are several features in LinkedIn that allow you to overcome the issues you can face in Facebook.

LinkedIn offers a lot of the same biographical information that Facebook has, the big difference is that people coming to LinkedIn expect to see more career oriented material. Completing a comprehensive profile on LinkedIn is important for rankings in the LinkedIn Search Engine.

Twitter

For your third account I recommend Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging site in that you can only send 140 character messages, just like text messages from your cell phone. Many people look at Twitter and shake their heads. It seems so limited with the short messages, how many messages there are, and the messages short duration on anyone's screen, if they see it all.

The reality is that the messages is not the power of Twitter. Twitter's powers lie in the search and syndication capabilities. You can create a message with Twitter and have it update your Facebook and LinkedIn status, post to your websites and blogs, and be available to anyone that happens to be searching the topic. Twitter messages also show up in Google searches and one more way that you can dominate the Google Search Engine with some specific keywords. Keywords are important in Twitter to ensure you attract the attention of the search engine.

YouTube

Fourth I recommend creating your YouTube Account. You may not use this one immediately but eventually you will want it. So make sure you brand it early on to ensure it is available when you are ready.

With YouTube being part of Google, your Google email address can be used for your YouTube log on credential. I find that it makes it easier to remember when a single account can be used for several different services.

Google

Another Social Networking Commuity is Google. You can create a Google profile to go along with all of the others. The Google profile, because of the Google name gets great rankings from the Search Engines. This is not a Social Network that you want to miss.

Blogs

The next place to be creating your identity is on your Blog(s). Blogs are a great way to create material fo syndiacation. You can create short articles (250 - 500 words) that can be published. The articles will show up in Search Engine Results, can be optomized with keywords, can be published on your LinkedIn Profile or FaceBook Page or FaceBook Fan Page. They are great also for engaging your readers in a dialogue, which is what web 2.0 is all about.

Other Sites

There are many other Social Networks that you can use to continue to propogate and promote your Brand. Where you go from here is limited only by the power of your imagination.

Your focus should be on sites where your prospective job, career, business, customer, client, and patient are spending time. Those sites where you would have the opportunity to participate in relevant discussions and share pertinent information.

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