Rohit Bhargava, author of the original “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization,” has published some notes about his new centralized social media bio. He’s talking about aggregating “all of my personal information into what I would consider a complete professional portrait. ” This aligns well with Polycot’s strategic recommendation that business entities should create a core identity and message. Bhargava identifies ten key categories of information about him that are included in his social media bio. Here’s a version of his list:
- His Bio - Background on his work experience, including bios of different lengths that can be used for cutting and pasting into blog posts, event descriptions or anywhere else where others would want to include some bio information for him.
- His Profiles - Sites where he has created personal or professional profiles that describe his background and experience.
- His Appearances – A list of conferences, seminars and events that he has spoken at over the last two years (he left off anything older than that).
- His Interviews – Links to interviews he has done for audio or video podcasts, as well as links to guest blog posts he has done on other blogs.
- His Publications - This is a list of white papers, presentations, published articles or any other thought leadership that have been published (outside of blog posts).
- His Favorites - Sites where he’s published a list of favorite websites, blogs or anything else.
- His Bookmarks - Similar to the favorites section, but at the moment dedicated to republishing my common tags he uses in his del.icio.us account, his primary tool for bookmarking.
- His Rankings & Honors - Widgets that show ranking numbers and stats for his blog, as well as a list of honors or awards over the past year.
- His Syndication – A list of sites that syndicate content from his blog and republish on their own networks with permission. Unauthorized syndications of content are obviously not included here.
- His Tags – Tags that he recommends using to define the content on his blog and index the content on directory or search sites.
Your list would vary depending on experience and goals, however the exercise of reviewing and cataloging online data about your and/or your business is extremely useful in helping you focus your web presence. At Polycot, and especially at my soon-to-launch new consultancy, Social Web Strategies, we would suggest a next step, creating a coherent story or message, as a crucial aspect of your web presence development. When we say “web presence,” we don’t mean your web site, though it’s a critical aspect of your presence. However, a web site is generally insufficient on today’s web. You have to consider all the other online places (communities, social networks, social bookmarking sites, presence applications, etc.) that have strategic relevance to your business.
