I gave this talk today at the Starkville/GTR meeting of the Public Relations Association of Mississippi.

Usually when I talk to groups about managing identity in social networks, the focus ends up being on privacy settings and information overload—how to balance the personal and the public and how to deal with the deluge of information we inevitably trigger by being involved in these networks.  Instead today, I’m going to venture out into the broader (and more helpful to you I hope) subject of identity creation and growth in business.  These topics are inevitably related, because whether or not you are a company or an individual, we all start out as newborns in any social network.  And like newborns, there is a natural process of growth and maturity that is inescapable.  No one is born into Twitter or Facebook with an identity, community and relationships in place, even if you are the most recognizable brand in the world.  The “who you are” in a social network relies on your work, your habits, your activities, and your connections as you create them.  Today I will go over what seem to be the current “best practices” for creating, growing and managing identities as a business in a social network.  There is no way for me to be comprehensive—at this point, people are building entire careers around these topics.  You may very well be more expert than I am at this.  I have been struggling with social networks for the MSU Libraries and for my own professional identity since 2007—and I mean struggling.   I cannot count how many times Facebook and Twitter have themselves convulsed and grown and re-invented themselves, often with me hanging by my fingernails along the way.  Not only that, but the Libraries and even I have done the same in the last four years—changing what we would like to be, how we would like to be seen, even our goals in the use of these tools.

And they are tools.  Tools you may not even need, or that may not be appropriate for you or the companies or organizations you represent.  My one guiding principle is to know about it, know about everything, experiment with anything plausible, but don’t implement anything unless there is a demonstrated need or goal.  Flat out.  There is no sense wasting time and resources on something that isn’t going to be used.  In fact, it could be detrimental.  A sad and static Facebook or Twitter page can be worse than not having one at all.

So….you have decided Facebook and/or Twitter are the place to be.  You have someone who is engaged and energetic and committed to entering into these relationships.  And they are relationships, with all that entails.  They take time and thought and creativity and investment.

The first thing to do is to begin to brand yourself.    Find a “username” that represents you that you can use across the internet in any social network you join.  For example, MSU_Libraries or AmandaClay or SBCoffeehouse.  In Facebook, it’s easier.  You can use whatever name you’d like—but make it searchable.  Make the name discoverable and simple.  You will be able to create a vanity URL for Facebook that identifies you—but at this point lots of them are taken.  Use a search engine like namechk.com to find which ones are taken and make yours symmetrical across the web.  This is important for several reasons.  1) Findability.  People will expect that once they know your identity in one place, it will be the same in other places. 2) Search results.  This will create “ownership” over this term.  For example, if you search “AmandaClay” or “Amanda Clay Powers”, I am in most of the results.  For “Amanda Clay Powers” I am in all the results for the first eight pages.

The second thing is to decide who you want to be.  You will experiment in the beginning, and you will have your blue eyeshadow period.  Your mother will not be there to wipe it off for you on the way out the door this time, though, so begin cautiously.

Your page or pages can be “static”—I’d call it Web 1.5.  Web 1.0 was the web before RSS, blogs, comments on news articles, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  If you make yourself interesting enough, Web 1.5 can be okay.  You can push information out, become “valuable,” create an identity and a name for yourself based on what you produce.  There is nothing wrong with this, but it is a different thing than jumping into the interactive, relationship-oriented world of Web 2.0.  The “Live Web”—this is the web people talk about moving their lives into—and this is the web where the real riches of brand relationship happen.

They key to Web 2.0 is to jump in to the mix.  Becoming part of a community is about finding your “people” and listening to them.  And then interacting with them.  It will not happen overnight.  This is something that more than any other way of being on the web demonstrates the growth cycle.  You will inevitably start out small.  Small is a great place to be.  This is where you can begin to build you strongest relationships.  In fact, depending on the community you serve, you may not want to be much more than small.  Strange Brew, for example, has a limited community to draw from—they are based in Starkville and circumscribed by coffee drinkers in Starkville that want something more than McDonalds and come to that end of town regularly.  However, they have managed to build a strong brand and community on Twitter—and not by being “professional” in the strictest definition.  SBCoffeehouse has opinions on Twitter, engages with the community, “loves” individual patrons, and knows when finals are.  During finals, frequently they will offer specials that are “instant”—i.e. first come first served.  Or contests with coffee drinks as prizes to engage their base, like coming up with what to put on the sign outside their building.  But the only reason it works is because their base is already listening.  And the only reason they are listening is because SBCoffeehouse listened first.  Created a specific identity that melds with the role of the coffee house in a university town.   They also follow their followers.  And their followers respond.  For the comments they make get just as many responses.  They follow 2010 people and are followed by 2005.  In Starkville, Mississippi, they have built a community of more than 2,000 people.

It is critical in Twitter to follow people back that follow you.  Not only is it considered “good manners” but it is also necessary if they want to send you a “Direct Message.”  We won’t go into the ins and outs of Twitter at this point, but the critical thing to know is if someone addresses you, there is a way for you to separate that flow out from the rest of the 2000+ people’s chatter.  You can use an RSS feed or click directly from within any Twitter application to see them.  You can have it “pushed” to a mobile device so you never miss it.  This is a new feature, but an extremely helpful one—especially with the pervasiveness of mobile tech now.

This feature is also available in Facebook, but Facebook is a different monster than Twitter.  Generally you will choose to create a “Page” in Facebook, which is not interactive in the same way that Twitter is, and in this way they can be symbiotic.  In fact you can have your Facebook posts automatically put on your Twitter page or vice-verse.

There are advantages to Facebook, however.  One of them is analytics.  Another is targeted advertising.  There are certainly services on Twitter that can analyze your Twitter account.  I’ve got a list of them up on my MSU Twitter Guide, but the one I like most is called Klout.  It has nothing on Facebook, however, because people actually put real information about themselves on Facebook, and so you can get actual demographics.

And the point of any of this is to know your audience so that you can be valuable to them.  So you can engage with them.  And finding out what they are interested in is difficult.  Finding out what they are interested in that helps build your brain is the holy grail.  The only way to figure this out is to listen.  One of the features of the newest New Facebook Page is that you can interact on Facebook as the page.   This means you can comment as the Page and you can have your own “feed” composed of Pages you have “liked.”  For us, this is a collection of MSU Pages, so we can know what is going on on campus.  For you it could be competitors—just know whoever it is, they will appear as liked Pages on your Page.

Watch your stats (Insights in FB Page talk) and see where they are coming from, who are they—ages are easiest, what they respond to.   In my experience, it is notices about hours or library information, then pictures of themselves for the Libraries’ Facebook Page first, but anything interactive is good too.  This is dangerous because you have to hope someone is going to respond.  There is nothing worse than posing a question or asking for involvement and hearing nothing back.  This, however, is just part of the growth process.  You will make mistakes.  Respond to them as quickly as you can, with humor if possible.  Transparency is key–be real.

To sum up, these are some of the current “best practices” for creating, growing and managing identities as a business in a social network.  Branding yourself, choosing your goals, listening, interacting, and adding value are the ways you can create and grow an identity in a social network.  Not all social networks are the same.  Twitter has different value, reach and purpose than Facebook.  There are other social networks that are valuable as well—investigate and listen.  Find out where your customers are and if a tool will be valuable.  Experiment and be willing to grow.  Growth can mean failure.  Transparency is key—respect your community and they will respect you.

The MS Library 2.0 Summit is back! We’ve re-imagined it as the MSU Libraries Emerging Technologies Summit, and we are already starting to get great submissions for the Steal-This-Idea sessions. We are so excited to have Jason Griffey as the keynote this year!

This conference started in 2007 with Michael Stephens introducing about 100 folks from eight states in the region to new technologies that were poised to change the library world. Along the way, some have–and some have disappeared–but the culture of learning that took hold after his visit has changed the MSU Libraries. We had cutting (bleeding?) edge presentations that have echoed in the library community since (mind you, this in was 2007):

A report from Southeastern Louisiana’s SMS virtual reference project (an early report from the pioneers of text messaging reference)
A workshop on the impact of social media, and Facebook in particular, for marketing in academic libraries
A panel on the challenges of institutionalizing 2.0 technologies in libraries

Enthusiastic about our work in the area and wanting more, we invited Sarah Houghton-Jan to come in 2008 to give us a big-picture for the state of 2.0 in the library world. Her timely keynote, Sustainable Web 2.0 Services for Small and Underfunded Libraries, came just as we were all beginning to feel the pinch of the economic downturn. Other sessions were perfectly timed for this Wild West period of 2.0 development in libraries, including:

Managing Identity in Social Networks / Information Overload
Using Google Analytics in Libraries
How Viral Marketing Can Help Your Library

Though we weren’t able to host the Summit in 2009, it has given us time to reflect on what we would like to know about (and talk about) at this point–in particular issues around assessment, sustainability and the future of social media in a post-2.0 environment. Now that we are using these tools, doing this outreach, in a culture of learning and growing, what’s next?

As we’ve done in the past, we’ll be podcasting and archiving the Summit, but nothing beats actually being a part of the discussion. If you’ve got something you want to talk about, consider submitting a proposal.

I had a great conversation with my colleague David Nolen this week about reading and writing being the same thing, essentially. Or how could they be. He’d been wrestling with the idea since he heard it from the Nobel-prize winning French writer J.M.G. Le Clezio who spoke at MSU recently.

Somehow this led to “does Twitter make you stupid” which David posed theoretically, and I, of course, rejected outright.

Twitter makes me smarter and super full of information and super-duper totally connected to everyone and everything all the time (gulp). –me

But, fighting knee-jerk reactions is my specialty, thanks to my father, and drilling down to the essential bits of the “changed-brains” theory that seems to be floating around, there does seem to be this new way of gathering information out there. Whether or not it’s changing brains, we continued to debate.

Thinking about Twitter, I imagine mainlining data. The myths (how could something so new already have myths?) that Twitter is about lunch or contemplating belly buttons is so beyond my experience it’s hard to know where to begin. I am acting as my professional/personal self online. I gather, evaluate and disseminate information (much like olde librarians of yester year). I put myself in my community to be of service to the community. I am still trying to be where my “patrons” are, when they need me. I have internalized my profession and I am actualizing it in this new world.

That being said, I have decided not to check Twitter until I have already accomplished things AT work. NOT to begin reading tweets from my bed via my iPhone as soon as I wake up, as has been my wont. It turns out that if I start mainlining too early, I get into that cloud of data and it’s hard to get back out to think about larger projects. I need that morning time to start thinking about projects at work. To get motivated. So is this an addiction? Or is it just hard to switch between two types of thinking? I don’t know. More to come.

A month ago my best friend and roommate Kris started a blog and got onto Twitter. He is a procrastinating playwright, among other things (poet, cabaret artist, award-winning actor and director, teacher…), who is currently running away from a very fine play he has started called 10 Mile. He is a storyteller and general pontificator in the grandest Deep South tradition. Discovering a medium where it is permissable to not-edit and not-judge and not-worry about writing has been a watershed experience for him. He is committed to his blog with an energy and enthusiasm I have rarely seen, set free of the torment and conflict that accompanies other kinds of writing. And now he is linking to this blog on his site. Currently the link is titled “best librarian in the entire world (wide web),” and he is posting excerpts from my blog.

One of the things I struggle with is creating with and managing online identity, and subsequently privacy. I consider my online life to be largely a professional life, but as I said at CiL2009 on the Managing Identity on Social Networks panel, I believe it is not possible to truly separate the professional and personal. Generally my approach has been to use privacy settings and judicious boundaries to control my identity online. Perhaps it goes without saying that Kris has a vastly different idea of judicious.

So once again, I’m back at the drawing board. As his editor, I would never want to stifle his creativity. There isn’t really anything wrong at all with his blog or his right to mention me or our life in it. It’s just not what I expected. At the same time that Kris has come into his own online, my family has gained momentum on Facebook. I now have 18 people on my mother’s side alone on Facebook. That’s right. Eighteen people. It was one thing when my brother or sister-in-law made the occasional comment on my Facebook page. It’s an entirely different thing to have my mother, cousins, aunts and uncles omnipresent.

So I’m calling it a developmental challenge…and I’m testing out my theory that creating and managing identity online is a series of developmental challenges that are necessary for growth. I’m just not exactly certain what that involves.

One of the things I’ve learned is that there is a challenge to the real-life relationship that goes along with these online developments. I’ve had conversations with my mother about what I want people to see about me on my Facebook page. I helped calm her anxiety about the difference between her news feed and her Wall when unexpected things appeared. I even deleted a Wall comment from my aunt that I thought revealed too much information about my grandmother. Now we are all on a private family Facebook Group, where we can share pictures and stories without the world watching.

And Kris. The respect we have for each other in person extends to the online world. And why wouldn’t it? Protecting and nurturing his creativity is a mission I have taken on with joy and great relish. And he is inordinately proud of my work and would never ever want to embarrass me. So every day, just like with the rest of his work, he reads his blogs aloud to me when I get home. He looks for my reaction as his editor and his friend. But if he’s used my name or a story about me, he’s looking for something more. Really we are all working together to find our balance.

Granted, this is not on the topic that I intend to be on, but it’s something that has been preoccupying me this year. I’ve been working on a talk about Managing Identity in Social Networks. A big part of managing identity is managing privacy. From the NYTimes article yesterday, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. But What About Privacy?”:

For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly. –Thomas W. Malone, the director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence

First, I find this idea of the “tribe” fascinating and very tangible. Growing up in a Southern Gothic family, the idea of the tribe is everpresent. Moving to Boston for fifteen years stretched the bounds of the tribe. But then, of course, I’ve moved back to a small Southern town a half-hour from much of my family, working ten+ hours a week on a fairly public reference desk in the University that makes up more than half of the town’s population.

And now I find myself creating tribes of my own. Twitter is probably the simplest online example. A constant, comforting stream of information about people I find interesting. Today I found myself worrying about a tweep who cut his eye over the weekend but still was trying to do his live podcast tonight. And considering what kind of tea a colleague brought to work that made her so happy. Or following the disappointment of another tweep who had worked all weekend on pathfinders and a workshop, only to find they didn’t match expectations. I learned about Oscar Wilde Day and enjoyed the Wildean quotes that came across my Twitter feed. I even had a tiny stab of disappointment as someone whose tweets I enjoy decided to stop following mine today (via the tribe-management tool from http://useqwitter.com). And as much as I enjoy the tribe I’ve made (along with the news streams I’ve created), I also like feeling responsible for my own contribution.

Facebook is a broader, more complex example. A meta-tribe. (Oh how I love anything meta.) It contains my work tribe, my tribe of library colleagues from across the country, a tribe of friends from the community theater, even a tribe of folks from media and PR around Mississippi who are interested in Social Media. For me, Facebook is a whole world of tribes, and all of them becoming more tightly woven, and occasionally crossing borders. And then my original tribe, the Southern Gothic Family Tribe, is on Facebook in Full Force. In the last two months, I’ve found out via Facebook about three engagements, a birth, and a family reunion–and these are first cousins, aunts and uncles, not long lost relatives. My 3-yr-old nephew’s abominable-snowman-dance graced my Facebook Wall during Christmas.

To match this tribal power, Facebook has developed complex privacy tools. So complex that I’ve had a hard time figuring out what they actually do. And I’ve been teaching classes about how to use them. The first step is to identify your tribes (FB calls them “friend lists”). Then you use these lists to allow each group to have varying levels of access to your information. Without these controls, it is as though you are suddenly born into a world complete with all the normal complex social connections and relationships, and everyone is in one big auditorium. Now try to manage your identity.

So…that’s what I’ve been thinking about.