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A personal brand used to be a luxury. It was for the Scobles of the world and something us normal folk didn’t need to worry about. Those days are gone. Today, building and protecting your personal brand is a necessity.

Your personal brand is your image on the Web. It’s the result of your established authority, attention, Google trust and the ever-so-slight manipulation on your part to ensure the best visions of you are getting the most attention. Building and protecting your personal brand is one of the most important things you can do to further your career and public persona. It’s even more important now that your Google Profile is ranking right up there with the one you created on LinkedIn. Thanks, Google.
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Everyone talks about using social media to connect with their customers and fans and engaging in deeper relationships and conversations. When meetings are done and it’s time to put the work, time, and energy where the buzzwords are, few companies are doing it, and even fewer are doing it well. One company who is doing it well is Starbucks. There are several elements to Starbucks strategy and in this article we’ll take a look at some of them. (more…)

No matter how much we can be frustrated with Digg nonexistent customer support and powered-by-few story selection, we can’t ignore the site.

Why? If you are an Internet marketer, you need to know what’s hot online. If you are a link baiter, you need to know what appeals to the public. If you are a blogger, you need constant stream of news and inspiration. And if you are a social media marketer, you need to be connected to power Diggers.

So accept this, Digg is still useful and monitoring it helps a lot (I wanted to say “is a must” but then thought many successful online marketers can still do without it, so not a must but very helpful).

With the huge number of stories submitted and categories to track it is not easy to monitor Digg and spend minimum time for that. So let me share just a few most useful tools that save time but allow you to keep an eye on Digg activity:

DiggTop

DiggTop (runs on Adobe AIR). What I really love about the tool is that:

• You can save time by not clicking through: you can get a summary of each story by clicking on it; you can also Digg the story and load associated images right within the tool.

• It has a plenty of options to configure for better monitoring and notifications:

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Twitter is recognized as one of the best viral marketing tools. So if you have a good post you think might go viral, Twitter is your best bet to attract people’s and ‘linkers’ attention to it.

One of the most important steps in turning Twitter into an effective viral marketing tool is to make the sharing process “smooth” – and a good Twitter button inviting nicely to spread the word can be highly effective.

Buttons That Encourage Readers to Tweet Your Posts

Wordpress Plugins

Tweet this! is a fairly popular WordPress plugin that lets users easily Tweet each post of the blog. It works like any social bookmarking button that allows to share a story with two clicks. It re-directs you to your Twitter home page and redirects a Tweet containing the post title and link; all you have to do is to click “Update”:

It also includes support for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. (more…)

If you are an avid Twitterer, you must be using some third-party application to send and receive Tweets. However this doesn’t mean you don’t ever enter Twitter web interface. The following Twitter Greasemonkey plugins will encourage you to do that more often and will make your Twittering experience enjoyable.

Note: since Twitter redirects /home page to /timeline/home now, you will have to manually edit the URL of the scripts sometimes. For this right-click the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar, choose “Manage User Scripts”, choose the script that is supposed to work on your Twitter home page, select the URL and change it to /timeline/home*

Integrate:

Twitter Search Results on Google: this script displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are search for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page:

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Do you remember how Facebook started? When Myspace had been around for a while, Facebook popped up as a clean, clutter-free alternative that cared for their users’ privacy and security. Naturally, with growing popularity Facebook lost many of its cool features and it is no more that calm place it used to be.

Of course, you may like new” Facebook but for those who miss the “good old” Facebook, here are some tips for you on how to remove some clutter and get control over your privacy settings:

Block Facebook Applications:

You can fully opt out of sharing information through Facebook applications. For that, you need to first remove any applications you have added, and remove your permissions to all external applications that you may have used.

After that, navigate: Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications -> “Settings” tab

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As Twitter goes mainstream, more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon and recognizing how useful it can be.  Twitter isn’t just for geeky computer types with nothing better to do with their time than talk to their friends 140 characters at a time.  Quite the opposite, really.  Twitter is quickly becoming a communication medium of choice between companies in a variety of industries and their customers. (more…)

Nothing is more important in today’s world of social networking and Web 2.0 than your online reputation.  Dipping a toe into that pool for the first time can be intimidating.  Millions of people use Social Media outlets, blogs, social networking and bookmarking sources on a daily basis – not only to discuss products, services and brands, but to share their experiences with others.  If you’re not actively monitoring and managing your online reputation, you’re falling behind countless individuals and companies that already are.

Knowing what is being said about you online is essential, whether from a personal or business standpoint.  More and more employers and prospective customers use the Internet to research a people and products by name, rather than simply relying on a resume, online profile or company website for information.

If you’re looking for a job, chances are anyone considering you for employment will Google you long before contacting you about a position.  If you don’t know what publicly accessible information exists, you are doing yourself a great disservice.  One of the best things you can do to manage your own reputation is start your own blog and make sure it ranks well when someone uses your name in a keyword search. (more…)

Linkbait is a term you may already know well. If not, linkbait can be quickly defined as a type of content, often a blog entry or photo, that has massively general appeal and lends itself to viral distribution. For instance, if you find this post to be exceptionally helpful and you think most of your friends would also enjoy it, you’ll send them a link. Chances are your friends will also enjoy what you sent them and forward the content in turn. This entire process is made simple by social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Del.ico.us that allow you to “click through” content recommended content. If you are not already signed up with one or more social bookmarking services, take a few minutes and get an account. Understanding how a system promotes your content will prove very helpful when you sit down to write a piece you’d like to see promoted. (more…)

As potential customers, business partners, and employers begin to use the Internet as a research and background check tool, your reputation in the search engines is becoming increasingly more important. For most of my clients I recommend taking a preemptive or proactive stance, and securing one or more listings on the first page for the company or their personal name, before there is a problem. However if there are already one or more unfavorable listings, there are still steps you can take to correct the problem, here is my basic plan for using social media reputation management. (more…)