talkingDigital

modify your avatar to bring people to the networks you prefer

You’re on Twitter. You’re on Facebook. You post comments to 10 blogs. You listen to music via Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace Music and Blip.fm. Your photos are on Picasa, Flickr and Photobucket – not to mention the old Fotki and Webshots accounts you setup and forgot about. Truth be told, you jumped into social media headfirst and began splashing around uncontrollably when you realized you couldn’t swim.

Take a moment and float on your back in the open water. This will give you time to meditate on where to go next. Before you panic because you feel buried by more social media accounts than you have time for, step back and set some small goals.

First, are you on too many social networks? Really. Do you need to be on all those music sites? Could you create ways to steer people to the service you like best?

Second, standardize. There are a thousand opinions on how to setup accounts for the social networks. When it’s all said and done though, if you are on too many to maintain, then you look bad on every site that you don’t update at least once a month and we all know it should be several times per week.

There is nothing wrong with homogenizing your social media presence if it make you more active across the social-media-sphere (there has to be a better word for it).

There are Facebook people, MySpace people, and bloggers. Everyone on the social media fits into one of these three categories. That is not to say that each type of person doesn’t dabble in other networks, but most people feel more comfortable with one of these three than they do with the other two.

MySpacers tend to search for fans, recognition and others who share a common interest. Facebookers tend to be looking for real world connections via social media relationships and bloggers like to control who is in their audience but they rely on social media as a tool to bring people to their blogs.

Sure, this leaves out LinkedIners, Ningers, Diggers, Stumblers etc. Those are microcosm social networks. Networks with a specific purpose. They can be used successfully, but usually require members to also work the other big three (Facebook, MySpace and blogs) to find real success.

WHAT?! I haven’t mentioned Twitter? I made it over halfway through the article and I didn’t mention Twitter?

If you are on Twitter and use it effectively, you probably know why. Twitter it a totally different animal. Using Twitter by itself, is like boating with ores and a sail, but no boat. You can get direction and speed using Twitter, but you can’t really get anywhere unless you have other vehicles that you are trying to draw people to. Twitter is the backbone of the social media.

Let’s get back to homogenizing (in a good way) your social media presence.

Start with your avatar (profile picture). If you are using a fairy, a skull, an Obama-ized portrait, a Disney character, a mugshot from SmokingGun, or any other image that is not of your face, dump it.

Find a nice photo of yourself – even if it is taken of you and by you with a cell phone camera held at arms length. Feel free to use that same avatar everywhere. There are some social media experts that recommend using a different photo on every network. Why? The argument is that it builds variety and makes you appear more active in the social media. Can’t the argument also be made that using the same photo creates a feeling of consistency thus building trust in the audience?

There is no doubt that you will build more trust from your audience by using an actual photo of your actual self than hiding behind a cartoon drawing of what may, or may not, be you.

If you have social networks that you would like a presence on, but you never want to have to visit, state it in your profile. Something to the effect of, “I am rich and famous now, but I don’t want to pay for a classmates.com account – if you want to find me, I’m hanging on Facebook.” Perhaps you can even modify your avatar pic by writing in big letters “Find me on Facebook.”

There will be some people who don’t care about you enough to sign up for an account on Facebook or MySpace, but those people don’t understand social media and you wouldn’t gain much if they did sign up. After all, this is the social media. Social people go where the best socializing is to be had.

While there are some who prefer to socialize in small groups of like-minded individuals, these people are generally referred to as pretentious and they will be just fine talking about books nobody reads with their 12 friends in a Ning group. These same people will likely be in a perpetual quandary about why their “social network” never gains any new members in the same breath that they bad mouth Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and the other mainstream networks.

Please leave a comment if you agree with me OR if I struck a nerve and you hate me now.