Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

I’ve written several posts here at The Future Buzz aimed at helping you, a web-savvy professional, navigate to success in your career. Previous posts in this series include:

• Do You Have A Marketing Plan For Yourself?
• Your Resume Is Meaningless (And Building Career Security, Not Job Security)
• The Rise Of Personal Branding

Today I wanted to discuss the importance of your digital reputation. Specifically, I want to talk about how you can protect it, how to nurture it and how to avoid missteps which can potentially ruin it. The truth is, your digital reputation is your real world reputation.

I’m frequently asked the question “how exactly do you create content that goes viral?” I always try and explain that while it isn’t lightning in a bottle, it isn’t something exactly formulaic either.

I’ll usually start answering the question by explaining whether you’re creating blog posts, images, videos, online marketing campaigns, web apps – you name it, it’s really all about the content. But all other things being equal, there is still a ton of great content out there you’re competing with. How exactly do you get your idea to replicate in the petri dish of the web and accelerate out of control between real users?

Are you in a corporation and see someone above you making mistakes? Put together a case and call them out, don’t ever let someone’s title stop you from that.

Find a better way to do something that’s more efficient than the way it has always been done? Don’t even ask permission, just put your new path into action.

Do you notice a vendor or agency you’re working with may not be the best choice? Don’t suffer in silence, find a better partner and cut those who are dragging you down.

For a while, I’ve been wanting to write an analytics post to share observations on traffic streams to provide insights to both marketers and bloggers. While I would love to share metrics and campaign successes from client sites, obviously permission is an issue there.

But since The Future Buzz is my own ongoing project for helping you create buzz, I thought I would take you through a few insights on some web analytics from this site for you to learn from. Plus it’s always interesting to look at someone else’s site metrics.

I’ve written previously on the idea of entrepreneurial journalism and writers as brands where I gave a few examples of successful individuals doing just that. Today I was lucky enough to convince pro blogger Sarah Perez to give us her story and share some insights on the themes presented here.

First some quick background: Sarah worked in IT up until 2008 when she became a full-time pro blogger. She writes for several publications in the niche of Technology including Read Write Web, Microsoft’s Channel 10, Sticks of Fire, and The Social Geeks to name a few and also has her own blog: sarahintampa.

Sarah represents what I believe is the future for the industry: she’s a smart, agile writer with a deep understanding of her niche who not only makes a living off blogging, but also uses social media to it’s full potential as an enabler for success.

How do you feel about Viacom suing YouTube for a billion dollars?

How about the RIAA pushing ISPs to hand over user data?

What about the Wall Street Journal editor claiming Google devalues everything it touches?

And now Hulu Hollywood pulling content from Boxee?

In each of these cases (and throngs of others), these organizations only succeed in:

• Destroying their public image with an onslaught of negative publicity
• Demonstrating how out of touch they are with our world
• Positioning themselves as companies clinging to a past that is no longer a reality
• Slowing down progress in an ultimate, inevitable transition that can’t be legislated or sued away
• Turning their back on tools which enable a profitable and prolific future that can actually makes their users happy
• Branding themselves as draconian
• Standing on the wrong side of the future media crossroads