‘On the Couch‘ is the new series of posts on SocialCouch.com which will feature interviews with social media experts, start-up guys and other tech savvy people. To kick start this interview series we have an amazing person on board. I am pleased to publish this interview with Mr. Richard Binhammer, Senior Manager at DELL handling Strategic Corporate Communications, Social Media and Corporate Reputation Management. Richard is more popularly known in the social media world as @RichardAtDell
Photo Credit : Brain Solis
1) Why social media? What is the motivation for Dell to travel on this track?
The best explanation for Dell’s social media involvement comes from our CEO, Michael Dell, who said this: “These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not. Do you want to be part of that or not? My argument is you absolutely do. You can learn from them. You can improve your reaction time. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.” October 17, 2007, BusinessWeek
You might also find Shel Israel’s interview (http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/02/michael-dell-ph.html ) with Michael Dell helpful in understanding the background of Dell forging ahead in social media over last 3 nearly 4 years
2) How well are these social media marketing efforts benefiting Dell. How different is it in comparison with conventional marketing methods and how good is the ROI?
Social media benefits depend on what your business objectives are to start with. There is no single ROI. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
In Dell’s case we have seen benefits in revenue generation; as an early alert to matters we want to address as a business; it has generated customer-inspired innovation; and we have seen benefits in terms of relationships with our customers, as well as overall brand and corporate reputation benefits, just to mention a few.
As for the difference with conventional marketing, I guess it depends on what you consider conventional marketing. If you mean advertising, two way conversations are very different than broadcast advertisements in terms of their tone, nature and cost. However, if you mean other conventional marketing methods like meeting with customers at a trade show or even a series of meetings, social media has much in common with those personal and direct connections.
3) Richard, your LinkedIn profile tells us that you are a senior manager at Dell handling social media and Strategic Corporate Communications. Do tell us how a typical day at work is? How big is your team and how do you work along with the @delloutlet team?
I’m not sure there is any such thing as a typical day. I start by checking Twitter and other “feeds” to see what is of importance to Dell and/or what is of interest to us from a social media perspective. I share that information and commentary with relevant people in various parts of our business, then I usually have a couple of meetings related to our social media initiatives and how we can continue to use social media for effective and efficient business purposes…then repeat earlier parts of the day online depending on the day or what is up.
It’s not my team…there are various Dell teams, from various businesses and we all work together, including @delloutlet. We work to share and keep forging forward both in social media but also in connecting with customers…to listen learn and engage in ways that make sense for the business and for our direct relationships with customers and business partners. We also work together to support more people in more parts of more of our businesses to discover the benefits and apply social media so that is useful in their job and for those interacting with, or interested in, Dell.
4) In the past Dell has tasted the bitterness of social media in the form of YouTube videos depicting exploding batteries, the Dell hell meme etc but now every social media case study talks about how Dell made $3M sales via Twitter and how the Direct to Dell blog increases customer interaction. How was this transition possible and how hard has it been?
The transition was both possible and straightforward when you go back and start from the answer to question 1.
5) We are all aware that @delloutlet is doing a great job in the US and @delloutletUK is also in place. Are there any plans to expand it on an international scale in countries like India, Germany and Canada where the twitter user base is growing rapidly ?
Check out dell.com/twitter and you will see this is rapidly underway. Canadians asked for Dell Canada on Twitter and that is why Dell Canada is there…and look at what they are also doing on Facebook. Dell in Brazil is growing strong on Twitter, as is Dell Outlet in Ireland and Australia in the small business market….I could go on but suffice it to say International growth on Twitter and elsewhere is a major consideration and priority.
User Questions
Sahil Parikh, Founder -Deskaway.com
6) How does a small business that is not known build a presence/brand on Twitter?
Hi Sahil and thanks for the question. Twitter is a great place for small business to broaden their markets and to really build loyal followers. Technology is great for small business, we all believe in that at Dell J. Have you seen the Dell tips for small business on Facebook …all about social media for small business? Specifically for Twitter, I always say identify your customers and listen first…then engage and join the conversations in valuable ways…and the customer relationships will strengthen and so will the business. Hope it helps.
Harini Ganesh:
7) Is there anything that Dell has learnt from their competitors who run similar efforts on Facebook, MySpace,Twitter etc?
Hi Harini…that’s a great question. I think every business that is a smart business is constantly listening, learning and engaging in this new social medium and that we all learn from each other and the various case studies and information around.
Himanshu Seth:
8) How did Dell get started with this whole twitter thing and do you remember how the first few customers on Twitter came in?
We really just started experimenting and then because of the specific business needs of @delloutlet there appeared to be some great business opportunities and through experimenting some more we proved those things meshed. I also believe the people and connections that were being made around Twitter also supported the business growth.
9) Finally, Have you ever felt that Dell or your team could have done things in a different way? In other words, has there been a ‘big mistake’ in this whole social media journey which you could have avoided?
I think you always live and learn and can always improve, personally and as a business. We always wonder about how to do things different – better and more effectively too. So in that respect, sure we can look back and say we could do this or that different, or let’s try it this way or a new way…and we constantly do that and are open to that. I know I personally stumbled some….but when you fall down, you stand back up, dust yourself off, learn from it, grow and do it better next time (I hope). As for any “BIG” mistake, I would say no big mistake…there were a couple tiny mis-steps where we made quick and public commentaries and like I said, learned and moved onward.
Hope you enjoyed reading this interview with Richard.
Please do take a minute and consider participating in this social charity experiment. For every Retweet and comment i will send $1 to charity.
I have been trying to do something like this for quite some time and now that i got an opportunity and a good cause to support here goes the experiment. Different forms of this experiment/cause have been done by other people but this is my experimental version. The word ‘Social Charity’ is not something that i coined but i am putting it in contextually in this case and here goes my definition.
‘Social Charity’ is the act wherein a group of social media users support a charitable cause either by action or contribution.
The ultimate aim of such an experiment is to raise money for a charity organization through social media and at the same time provide some kind of benefit for the company/blog which initiates the experiment. To kick start this experiment, I am starting it on Social Couch and the benefiting charity will be Bhumi Chennai ( http://bhumichennai.org ) with Dr. Prahalathan being the person of contact. Bhumi is a non profit organization which works with under-privileged children in and around Chennai.
The Action Steps
1. For every new confirmed email subscription , Social Couch will donate $1 to Bhumi Chennai.
Opens in a new tab or window. When you enter your email address and confirm it, all new articles published on SocialCouch will be delivered directly to your inbox. This email will not be used for any other purpose.
2. For every new confirmed RSS subscription, Social Couch will donate $1 to Bhumi Chennai.
Subscribing via RSS will send in the latest articles to your feed reader.
3. For every comment posted on this entry, Social Couch will donate $0.5 to Bhumi Chennai.
4. For every retweet of the below text, Social Couch will donate $0.5 to Bhumi Chennai
Social Couch is donating $125 to BhumiChennai.org in this Social Charity experiment http://tr.im/CaO6 Please participate & RT
To make the $125 reach Bhumi Chennai one of these should happen before the end of the ten day time period. 125 new subscribers OR 250 comments OR 250 Retweets or a combination of these. An optimal success result can be something like this
25 new RSS subscriptons
25 new email subscriptions
30 comments
120 Retweets
A person can feel free to perform more than one action step. The total duration of the experiment is 10 days and any/all the action steps performed during the next ten days from the time stamp of the post will be counted. The subscriber count will be obtained from the Feedburner statistics and the Retweet count from Tweetmeme. The maximum amount which SocialCouch.com will donate to Bhumi Chennai through this socialcharity experiment is $125. The money will be paid via Paypal.
Why am I doing this?
- The Bhumi volunteers are doing a great job helping out the kids and staying in a land thousands of miles away this is the one small deed that i can do for now. On a lighter note i also want to increase my karma points!
- I know for sure that this money will be put to good use and Bhumi as an organization doesn’t have big overhead costs. The major part of this money will serve the deserving population directly.
- This will serve as a small case study for one of the projects which i am intending to start in the coming months
- This will bring in traffic and gain exposure for Social Couch as a blog and a brand. Although I have no plans of monetizing SocialCouch for now this might help me in the future.
- This will provide an opportunity for others to help a charitable cause without chipping in money.
Seriously! Is this Ethical?
I have discussed this with a few people and in my opinion this whole experiment is totally fine. First of all, i am not seeking monetary contributions from anyone and i am the only contributor. A few weeks back i read a nice post from Manas Tungare about the exploiting nature of Marathon Fundarisers. I would not put this on the same line but still it had some good points to infer. I am not exploiting my social graph directly too. As a reader if you have any objection regarding the ethics of this experiment do let me know and i will take the necessary corrective action.
What if it succeeds?
Stay tuned! I will let you know.
For now all i need is one step of action from you!
One of the biggest assets for Twitter is the search and the user generated information that populates the time line is really immense. The best part of Twitter search is that the results are produced in real time unlike the conventional search engines which provide only indexed results. Both Microsoft and Google have been trying to strike search deals with Twitter but that is a whole big story in itself! Most of the query operators like AND, OR, etc which we use in the conventional search engines will work in Twitter search also. Apart from these standard operations there are many other interesting things which you can do with Twitter search.
Search Operators
Twitter has published the whole list of search operators that will pull out valid results when you key in those in the search box. Let us take a look at how you can use some of the operators to get desirable results.
Finding local tweets/tweeps
Building conversations spinning around the local community is one thing that Twitter has enabled. Using the “near:” operator you can find people/tweets that come from the specified location.
Example: If i want to find tweets that are published by people who live in a 20 mile radius from Blacksburg , the query is near:blacksburg within:20mi
Searching for particular terms or events with a location parameter also works.
football near:blacksburg
conference near:blacksburg
Finding jobs/Hiring people
It is hard to find the right people to hire within a particular city and at the same time it is not an easy task to find the right job in the right place. A sample search query “PHP developer” near:”san francisco” pulls out many job postings.
This will also be helpful for freelancers who are looking for projects to work on. The same works well if you are looking to hire someone too.
Conversations/Tweets/ Links
If you are looking for interesting conversations or links to material on a particular topic these search queries will be of good help.
from:ramanujam to:RichardatDell – Lists all the replies that i made to @RichardatDell
from:ramanujam :) – Lists my tweets which had the smiling emoticon
from:ramanujam filter:links – Lists my tweets that had an external link
Save/Subscribe to searches
The Twitter search interface also provides an option for saving search queries. For instance, if you are a web hosting seller providing vps hosting then one good option to find new customers to do a keyword search for ‘vps hosting’. You may also have similar keywords like ‘dedicated hosting’ , ‘managed hosting’ etc. With the “Save this search” option you can create a link to these search queries and check them back whenever you want. Twitter does provide an option to subscribe to the search results in RSS format.
This is also one way to monitor keywords on Twitter but there are many third party tools which will help you to do this in a better way.
Twitter Advanced Search
If you are not the person who likes to experiment with the different query combinations then the Advanced Search is for you.With different keyword based search options, location parameters, attitudes, the advanced search helps to do a targeted search for specific information.
User Scripts/Addons
If you are a Firefox user there are a few options which will help you to use Twitter search in an easier way than others. The Twitter search addon will enable you to look up real time Twitter search results inside the browser.
The Twitter search results userscript (requires Greasemonkey addon) shows real time Twitter search results in Google search pages.
Better Twitter Search Engines
If you are a long time Twitter user then you would definitely know about ‘Summize.com’. Twitter acquired the company in July 2008 and integrated it with the main site. The search tool is definitely a great tool but there are a few other Twitter search engines which will help you to look up things in a better way.
Twazzup is one such website which provides better insights like news, photos etc along with the search results.
Bing tweets is a nice mashup which combines the trending topics in twitter and shows corresponding search results from Bing.
Twibs is a business directory/search engine where in business owners can add their Twitter accounts.
The above three are only examples and there are several other applications built using the Twitter search API.What is your favorite Twitter search application?
I bet each and every one amongst us would have got followed by numerous porn stars and ‘make $1000 from home’ guys on Twitter. As every internet medium grows bigger one of the biggest challenges would be to combat the spam. Initially Twitter didn’t impose any follow restrictions and as the early bird gets the worm, the spammers started following thousands of people every single day so that they can increase their follower count by the way of reciprocation. The smart guys at Twitter imposed a 2000 follows per day restriction along with few other API restrictions. The growth was massive and this didn’t trouble the spammers much, thanks to hundreds of auto follow systems and scripts.
One good thing which Twitter can learn from Google is to build a Twitter spam control team. Google has an awesome spam protection team headed by Matt Cutts and they do keep under control. Although there are some measures which Twitter has taken till now, a lot more can be done. @spam is the official spam reporting account for Twitter. If you come across a spam account you can send a @ reply to that account. Blocking users is one other effective way but with the immense amount of spammers we get bored after a certain point. There are a few apps which will let you clean your follower/following list but the trustworthiness of the app is a big question which comes in front.
Clean Tweets Firefox addon
Recently i started using Twitter search for finding out real time search results. For example if Youtube or dreamhost goes down the first thing i do is to do a keyword search on Twitter as it gives out the up to date user powered results. The most annoying thing is the search time line is bombarded with lame marketers and spammers who promote all the possible products on earth. The Clean Tweets Firefox add on is a nice solution which eliminates some results from the search time line based on certain parameters like age of the account, number of trending topics used etc.
Protect Your Twitter Account
As an end user the best we can do is to protect our Twitter account from malicious attacks. Here are some simple steps which you can do to safeguard your account.
1. Don’t give your Password
Don’t give your Twitter username and password to an application or website at any cost. There are some trusted twitter clients which will need your password though. Make sure that you verify the authenticity of the client before letting out your credentials.
2. Remove unwanted connections
Twitter uses OAuth which is a secure method of providing access to your account information without revealing your password. Over a period of time most of users give access to a number of such services. If you are no longer using a app/service it is better to remove the connection and revoke the access.
Clicking on Settings-> Connection on your Twitter account will list all the connections and you can revoke the unwanted ones. Alternatively you can also follow this URL to go directly to the connections page. http://twitter.com/account/connections
3. Look before you Click
Don’t click on the links present in your replies or direct messages from unknown users. Clicking on these links may give access to your account to the impostor without your knowledge.
4. Block and Report
If you see a spam account following you block it and this will make sure that the replies made by the spammer will not show in your time line. Also, look before you follow !
5. Change your password
The basic and golden rule when it comes to passwords! Keep changing it once in a while and don’t use the same password across different services.
What are other ways in which Twitter can control spam? Do share it in the comments section.
Tracking the social habits of people is one of the interesting things that has been made easy by social media. There are many user powered sites where people can voice out their views by making a status update like in Twitter or sending a text message or uploading a picture. Most of these sites make a provision for anonymous updates and taking a rough glance will also tell you that many users provide the update without disclosing their name and location. Here are some of the sites that fall under this category.
PS: Some of these sites may have obscene language and might not be suitable for audience of all age groups. So please be cautious. On the other hand, i can assure that this post is pretty safe for work!
FMYLife stands for Failing MY Life and it is undoubtedly the most popular site of the lot. It serves as a medium where users can let out the frustrating happenings in their daily life. As the site says “it allows you to realize that you are not alone”. The success of this site can be attributed to how people can relate themselves to the screw-ups that happen in others’ lives. A voting system with “I agree, your life sucks” and “You deserve it” helps people to cast their opinions.
TFLN or Texts From Last Night works on the interesting notion that some people prefer texts rather than conversations and also people tend to text a lot at the night time that too when they get drunk. The site asks the users to just enter the area code and the content so that it reveals the best parts and at the same time it covers personal information. In general, we will be curious to know what is happening in our locality and TFLN has rightly captured this by making a provision to segregate the updates by area code.
MyLifeIsG or My Life is Good is the reverse version of FMyLife. It documents the small but nice happenings in the daily lives of people. If you are looking for a one minute motivation, then this is the site you have to visit. If you feel that ‘your life is awesome’ then go ahead and post it over there and share your happy moment.
The reality is everyone doesn’t excel in life and MyLifeIsAverage is a site which stands as a testimony for this fact. The majority of the world lives and dies an average life and sharing those mediocrities makes things a little bit interesting. What makes this thing interesting is how insignificant stories happening in an anonymous person’s life brings in some sort of relevance/significance to the reader.
IJML or ‘I Just Made Love’ is a nice visual representation which shows where in the world people made love. A pretty good example of how the Google Maps API can be utilized! Users can update their location in real time and the site also provides nice time based filtering.
6. F**K My Sex Life
This comes from the makers of FMYlife and to quote from the site.
it’s a wonderful little site where you can share your less than desirable situations about your sex life or other people’s sex lives
Not much to explain or post a screenshot!
Users randomly text some one asking “you can tap that” and post the reply which they get. Although it may be inappropriate to do such a thing it is pretty common among college going kids!
Once again not much to explain or post a screen shot!
Every day we will have some small happy moments like finding a long lost pen or receiving a wish from a friend which will make our day. ‘It Made My Day’ is a site where you can share and read about such small and sweet happenings. It is pretty similar to MyLifeIsG.
Although this one is not similar to the other sites in the list it forms a nice conclusion. Users submit pictures of junk food which looks really good. The site also has a very nice caption-’Where dreams become heart attacks’.
One interesting similarity which can be noted in most of these websites is that as a end user we have no connection in the social graph with the poster but still we will be able to relate to it in some cases. Have you come across any other sites similar to the ones listed above? Do share it in the comments.
If there is one thing which annoys every web developer and designer it has got to be Internet Explorer and more importantly IE6. The sad fact is that a good percentage of internet users still use the age old browser either out of ignorance or force. There are many companies which use IE6 for the Intranet and installing another browser would be prohibited or the installation would involve huge deployment costs and with no alternative, the employees will be forced to use this age old browser which doesn’t confirm to any of the latest web standards.
Building web applications which use the recent HTML 5 canvas tag, java script performance features etc is not supported on IE and it is also not feasible to ignore the IE users because they still form a good percentage of the lot. Most of the developers spend a lot of time doing work around for IE users like writing different style sheets or the worst part is they ignore some of the features.
Enter “Google Chrome Frame” which is a plugin for IE and it brings in all the open web technologies in Google Chrome to the Internet Explorer. To simply put it, we can get a chrome browser inside IE by using this plugin.
If you are a developer:
All you have to do is just enter this single tag at the top of your code
<meta-http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”chrome=1″>
When this code is detected by Chrome Frame it switches over to use the web kit rendering engine and makes things awesome.
Why is Google doing it?
1. Google wants to make the web better. Understood!
2. Increase the penetration of Chrome. Most of the companies which have used IE for eons will never switch over to Chrome. This may serve as a nice incentive to try Chrome without making major changes.
3. Making Google Wave run on IE 6 will be a herculean task and the Chrome frame will ease out a lot of pain to the developers.
4. A nice way to tell Microsoft to stop IE6 support?! May be!
The big question is how many of the IE6 users are going to install the Chrome frame plugin. If they have been on IE6 for so long without having the urge to upgrade they will continue to be and the developers will keep figuring out workarounds as new technologies emerge.
Image Credit: oneBlog
It is really hard to spot a person who does not tweet or have an account on face book. Every one loves to tell the world about what they are up to and at the same time curious to know what is happening with their friends, family, colleagues etc. Celebrities belong to one big breed which keeps the social media sites hot and happening. Twitter and Facebook fan pages of celebrities serve as an avenue for the common man to get to know their heroes better and also to interact with them at times. Without the celebrities from various walks of life the social media world would definitely not be as interesting as it is now. Here are some funny instances which prove that celebrities rule social media.
1. The Million follower secret
Now there are many people and organizations with more than a million followers on Twitter. Ashton Kutcher was the first person to achieve this feat and now he is sailing strong with more than 3.6 M followers. It was an interesting competition between @cnnbrk and @aplusk as to who will reach the landmark. It is also worthy to note that Ashton was live streaming on Ustream and sharing the victory with all his fans.
2. The Tennis Hero’s twin babies
It is a well known fact that celebrity magazines pay millions of dollars to get the first photos of famous persons’ babies. Roger Federer went out of normal way and shared the first picture of his twin babies on his Facebook fan page and his 2.5 million fans on the social network would not have been more happier. This photo got more than 30000 comments and over 100 thousand people clicked on the ‘Like’ button. In the ESPN interview with Federer it was also revealed that the he was getting “2 fans per second” on the Facebook profile.
3. The Oprah Effect
Initially Twitter was something which the tech guys and the geeks used and one of the good reasons for the wide spread usage across various sectors can be attributed to Oprah Winfrey. When Oprah sent her first Tweet on April 17th 2009, Twitter saw a massive 43% traffic boost when compared with the previous week and 37% of it came from new visitors to the site. Twitter.com also went offline for a while on that day showing the infamous fail whale as it was unable to react to the Oprah effect.
4. Hits, likes and more
Twitpics posted by celebs get thousands of views within minutes and a random status message on Facebook gets several hundred comments and likes. This one is a classic example! Being a fan of The Big Bang Theory, this one from Sheldon Cooper made me chuckle.
5. The Top 100
Not a big surprise but if you look at the top 100 twitter users published by Twitterholic it is flooded with all the big celebrities. Only a few well known companies like Google, CNN, Zappos etc feature in the list and the rest of it is pretty much dominated by the celebrities.
Do you follow celebrities on Twitter, Facebook or some other social media site? Do they make the place more interesting or just use it because everyone else does?
Every single word which a person posts on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is documented in one way or the other and at times it may even spark controversies. With the media and the weblogs craving for attention even the smallest of the controversies will spread on like a wild fire. Here are some interesting tweets which got people into trouble.
Dr. Shashi Tharoor is the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and he is pretty active on Twitter with more than 180k followers. A random follower asked Tharoor if he will travel in economy class and he replied in a witty manner targeting the airlines but the Indian National Congress condemned his tweet stating that it was not in line with the political culture.
The newspapers and the TV channels also picked this up and made it even more controversial.
2) The Cisco Fatty
@theconnor tweeted:
Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.
In reply @timmylevad tweeted
@theconnor Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.
This was probably the first well known ‘Twitter trouble’ incident where a guy who was offered a job in Cisco tweeted negatively about it and he eventually ended up losing the job. @theconnor has now protected his twitter time line and has also created a site where he has written a detailed explanation about the incident.
3) Terry Moran and Barrack Obama
@TerryMoran tweeted
Terry Moran, the ABC anchor tweeted saying that President Obama called Kayne West a jackass. ABC later apologised for the immature tweet made by Moran and stated that Obama made that statement off the record
4) The CPK server
@Traphik tweeted
@calpizzakitchen black button ups are the lamest shit ever!!!.
Timothy DeLaGhetto worked at the California Pizza Kitchen and he tweeted the above statement and later he was fired as CPK thought it was inappropriate. Ironically @Traphik became famous on Twitter and now has more than 17500 people following his updates.
5) Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban, the owner of Dallas Mavericks criticized the decision of the match officials on Twitter and the NBA fined him $25000 for making such remarks.
6) Courtney Love
@courtneylover79 tweeted
is my clothes my WARDROBE! oi vey don’t **** with my wradrobe or you willend up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted till your dead.
Courtney Love, the rock star made some defamatory comments about her fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir after she sent Courtney an invoice for the clothes she designed. The result, Courtney was sent a lawsuit for her rants on twitter!
7) The Military Twitterer
Mark Kirk, the republican congressman and Navy Reservist tweeted while on duty at the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center. It is against the Military protocol to reveal one’s location and duties. Kirk later made a public statement saying that “It’s something that I will not do again,”.
When you are in public domain it is always good to look before you tweet and look before you follow.
Most of the PC users are anxiously waiting for the final release of Windows 7 but one thing which will stop a good percentage of them from buying it is the big price tag attached with the new operating system from Microsoft. If you are a student there is one more reason to smile! Microsoft has always been nice to the student community and now with the big release of Windows 7 they are being even more nice. With a valid .edu email address students can get the Home edition of Windows 7 for $29.99 which is a big steal when compared to the normal retail price of $120. The glad news is you don’t have to be a current student and if you still have your .edu address from your university working you are good to go. You can preorder Windows 7 at Win741.com. Multiple updates about this offer were made on the official Microsoft and MSWindows twitter accounts
Earlier Windows 7 was made available to all the student members of ACM (Association of Computing Machniery) but Lillian Israel, the Director of ACM memberships sent over a mail stating that many non-computing students were joining ACM just to get Windows 7 license and hence they have removed it from the Developer Academic Alliance. But still many other worthy software packages are offered as a part of the student membership. I am a current ACM student member and when I logged in to my web account i was surprised to see that Win XP, Win Vista, Visual studio, Visio etc were offered for free to the student members. The membership also provides many elearning resources apart from discounts for ACM conference registrations. The ACM membership page provides more information about the benefits.
It is really important to have an online identity because the first thing which a prospective employer or a customer or a business acquaintance is going to do is to perform a Google search for your name. You don’t want to have some of your drunken pictures or bad comments showing up when your name is searched for. We should always remember that everything we do online is getting documented in some way or the other and also the information is available openly for everyone to see. There are some simple steps which will help to boost your personal reputation in the internet world.
Image Credit: Geek and Poke
1. Create your blog or homepage
It is always good to have a personal blog or a homepage where people can find information about you. Getting a domain name with your first and/or last name in it is really a good practice and it will feed some nice value to the search engines. Having relevant keywords in the domain name is one of the common strategies which search engine optimizers follow. In most cases it might not be possible to get a domain name which is same as your name. In such cases try alternative domain extensions or domain hacking. If you are blogging under a brand name make sure that your full name is prominently visible in the about section and in all other places possible (Eg: Posted by John Kramer). If you are a student, putting up your resume and contact information on the homepage is a good practice.
2. Social media profiles
Creating profiles on the prominent social networks will definitely boost your online presence. One important thing to keep in mind while creating profiles in social media sites like Twitter, Delicious, Digg etc is to have a consistent user name. Like in the previous case, it is good to have your first name/last name combination as your user name rather than having something like zombieking or techieboy. Just creating the profile and leaving it deserted is of no use. There are many cases where people have found their prospective employers via social media channels and it is always good to be participative. Creating a professional profile on LinkedIn and furnishing the right details will be of good help to explore a lot of opportunities and get new professional contacts.
3. Think before your post
Every status update which you post on Twitter or every comment which you write on your friend’s face book wall is getting archived. It is always good to think for a second before your post. Swearing is one thing which most of us are good at but keeping it off the online world is a big ‘to-do’ if you are looking to have a positive reputation. Bitching about your current or past employer is a big no and so is foul mouthing about products or services in public space. Being careful and choosy about your online contacts is a plus and it is also good to look before you follow.
4. No drunken pictures
A recent study by Careerbuilder.com revealed that 45% of employers looked at social profiles of the candidates whom they were looking to hire. Drunken photos, reference to drug usage, swearing are some of the reasons why candidates were denied. The good lesson which we can learn from this study is to keep our Facebook profile clean and untag all the drunken pictures posted by friends.
5.Track,Track,Track
Track who is talking about you. Some of the methods to do this are to check your @replies on twitter and set up Google alerts for your name. Although this is more important for brands, it works out well for individuals too.
6. Google Yourself
Google yourself or Ego surf and see if things look fine when your name is searched for. Although nothing much can be done for the existing results, doing the steps listed above in the right way may change the results in your favor over a period of time.
