Manging your online identities – Leslie Poston

At this week’s North Shore Web Geeks meetup, Leslie Poston of Uptown Uncorked and Mashable gave a quick presentation on how to manage your online identity.

Photo from Marc Amos via BrightKite
(Photo from Marc Amos via BrightKite)

You can find her own recap here (with slides). Here’s some random notes I jotted (on my phone to evernote) I found interesting:

Don’t try to actively manage identities / profiles / updates on the 600+ sites out there. Don’t let your profiles rule your life.

Instead, choose just three: she chose Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Why? Those are the ones which seem most useful to her for locating clients, getting key news updates, and keeping in touch with friends. Your three may vary.

[I feel a need for closer to ten: Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, BrightKite, Dopplr, TripIt, Last.fm, and Identi.ca. I guess if I were to choose between Linked In and Xing, between Dopplr and TripIt, and between Twitter and Identi.ca, I’d be down to seven. Still can’t quite get to three. That also leaves out project specific ones like Drupal.org or WordPress.org where I have an account/profile associated with a specific community, or broad aggregators like Chi.mp, Strands, and FriendFeed, not to mention my own johneckman.com – but then I don’t update those directly, they copy content from other places.]

Half of her clients (as a social media consultant) she advises not to focus on Twitter. For example, law firms or regulated industries which have significant privacy concerns – even with “protected” accounts it has happened that Twitter has inadvertently exposed private messages. That said, though, one of her clients – La Casa De Las Vides winery in Valencia – founder her on twitter as she was tweeting with someone in Spanish. (They’re having a Boston Blogger Wine Tasting this week).

This doesn’t mean, though, that you should ignore the sites you aren’t going to keep as your primary networks. You should regularly claim your name: get your logo, picture, link up. This is important to prevent others from claiming your name and acting as you.

She uses repeater services like ping.fm to post to her secondary networks once or twice a day – just so the accounts don’t fall dormant – but doesn’t push all updates everywhere as that gets too spammy.

Her social toolbox includes:

She also includes as a tool her phone: HTC Mogul (Windows Smartphone) running iCal and SyncMate for Mac.

She also discussed FriendFeed, Strands, SocialMedian, SocialThing, Yammer, and SocialCast, as well as TweetBeep.

Are you able to limit your activity and profile management to just three sites?

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