A major up-and-comer in the internet startup and social media space has been FriendFeed, the lifestreaming service that allows you to track what your friends are doing on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and the blogosphere. Unfortunately, most of your friends are probably not using FriendFeed, at least yet. But that doesn’t mean that FriendFeed isn’t very, very useful. I’m going to talk about the usefulness of FriendFeed as a social media organizer in a future post, but this time I want to talk about how to use FriendFeed to follow the chatter, the buzz, and even mentions of your company or blog (or of yourself).

FriendFeed is the ideal place to track all of those mentions. The first key to Friendfeed is its importing of activity all across the internet. I can find out what, oh, social media expert Muhammad Saleem is Digging or I can find out what the hell top blogger Robert Scoble is up to (wait, why do I care again? Oh yeah, he sets trends).

The second key thing that FriendFeed does is create conversations around some of these major pieces of information. To the left is the beginning of some search results I did for Obama. There’s at least 13 comments/conversations and growing for that single link alone. Tracking the entire conversation on Obama gives you an even greater picture of what people are thinking, although I admit that it’s a tech-saavy, early-adopting crowd. Regardless, these people set trends and you want them setting trends for you or your blog in a positive direction.

Some things you can do to track the chatter:

• Add trend setters to your FriendFeed. Scoble may be annoying at times (sorry Robert, it’s true!), but he is at the pulse of a lot of trends. Follow the top bloggers and trend setters in your industry to gain a better picture of what is happening.
• Track non-users of FriendFeed: Another brilliant feature of FriendFeed is the ability to track people who aren’t even on FriendFeed via “imaginary feeds”. If your favorite Digger is NOT on FriendFeed, you can just input his username as an imaginary feed and you’ll get his updates in your FriendFeed. Perfect if you don’t want to track too many websites in the social media space.
• Search! FriendFeed has a search option now, and you should utilize it to the best of your ability. Keep track of mentions of your blog or mentions of your competitors.
• Join Relevant Rooms. Rooms are basically conversation hubs within FriendFeed. I’m in the Social Media and All Things Productivity Rooms. With them, I can follow conversations on my favorite and important subjects along with others who know a thing or two about each subject. I think it’s best if you make sure conversations from your rooms appear in you main feed.
• Add every service you use! The more you appear on other FriendFeeds, the more you raise your profile and the more interesting conversations you will start. Import your blogs and social websites at the least.

There’s much more to FriendFeed than that. And it’s a new service, meaning many more features are coming. If you do things right, you can make FriendFeed your entire hub for social media and internet chatter tracking.

- Ben

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A major up-and-comer in the internet startup and social media space has been FriendFeed, the lifestreaming service that allows you to track what your friends are doing on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, and the blogosphere. Unfortunately, most of your friends are probably not using FriendFeed, at least yet. But that doesn’t mean that FriendFeed isn’t very, very useful. I’m going to talk about the usefulness of FriendFeed as a social media organizer in a future post, but this time I want to talk about how to use FriendFeed to follow the chatter, the buzz, and even mentions of your company or blog (or of yourself).

FriendFeed is the ideal place to track all of those mentions. The first key to Friendfeed is its importing of activity all across the internet. I can find out what, oh, social media expert Muhammad Saleem is Digging or I can find out what the hell top blogger Robert Scoble is up to (wait, why do I care again? Oh yeah, he sets trends).

The second key thing that FriendFeed does is create conversations around some of these major pieces of information. To the left is the beginning of some search results I did for Obama. There’s at least 13 comments/conversations and growing for that single link alone. Tracking the entire conversation on Obama gives you an even greater picture of what people are thinking, although I admit that it’s a tech-saavy, early-adopting crowd. Regardless, these people set trends and you want them setting trends for you or your blog in a positive direction.

Some things you can do to track the chatter:

• Add trend setters to your FriendFeed. Scoble may be annoying at times (sorry Robert, it’s true!), but he is at the pulse of a lot of trends. Follow the top bloggers and trend setters in your industry to gain a better picture of what is happening.
• Track non-users of FriendFeed: Another brilliant feature of FriendFeed is the ability to track people who aren’t even on FriendFeed via “imaginary feeds”. If your favorite Digger is NOT on FriendFeed, you can just input his username as an imaginary feed and you’ll get his updates in your FriendFeed. Perfect if you don’t want to track too many websites in the social media space.
• Search! FriendFeed has a search option now, and you should utilize it to the best of your ability. Keep track of mentions of your blog or mentions of your competitors.
• Join Relevant Rooms. Rooms are basically conversation hubs within FriendFeed. I’m in the Social Media and All Things Productivity Rooms. With them, I can follow conversations on my favorite and important subjects along with others who know a thing or two about each subject. I think it’s best if you make sure conversations from your rooms appear in you main feed.
• Add every service you use! The more you appear on other FriendFeeds, the more you raise your profile and the more interesting conversations you will start. Import your blogs and social websites at the least.

There’s much more to FriendFeed than that. And it’s a new service, meaning many more features are coming. If you do things right, you can make FriendFeed your entire hub for social media and internet chatter tracking.

- Ben

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(thanks to Mazy for his help on this article)

Just three or four years ago, a person could have successfully managed separate online and offline lives (and yes, separate reputations). There was general anonymity to what you did on the internet. You could do the things you wouldn’t normally do in the real world on message boards and internet communities.

Not anymore.

I don’t care whether you’re a 40 year old business executive, a hot-shot entrepreneur, or a 16 year old power user on Digg; you need to control what’s being said about you on the internet or it will bite you in the ass.

You don’t need a high priced firm to help you do this. Hell, you can do a better job enhancing your image and putting out great content because, well, nobody else is you.

Without further ado, six ways to control and enhance your image on the Internet:


1) Search (and research) your name

It’s time to do your homework. You think you know everything about yourself, but you’re wrong. There are millions of people on the internet who have an opportunity to write about you, defame you, or even write about a person with the same name but could inadvertently damage your image. It’s time to do some searching.

• The first thing you must do is search yourself on Google. You’ve probably done it before out of curiosity, but now do it intelligently. Search your name, variations on your name, and all nicknames. For me, that would be “Ben Parr”, “Benjamin Parr”, and “Benjamin E. Parr”. When searching for your name, make sure you use quotation marks (” “) to make sure you aren’t getting results with only your first or your last name.

  Now that you’re searching, take note of anything relating to you. Are there any news articles that pop up? Any blog posts? Are they about you, or are you just being quoted? Does anyone who shares your name come up? Could people searching for you confuse that person with you? Generally, only the first page of search results matter, but I would look at the first twenty to thirty results to get a full picture of your image on Google.

  Repeat this every couple of weeks to track changes in search results.

• Second is to search for your name on Social Media Firehose. Social Media Firehose, built and hosted on Yahoo! pipes, searches specifically through social and networking websites. Kingsley Joseph’s tool will look through Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, and other social media websites for mentions of you. You can limit searches to exclude specific websites (I suggest removing Twitter if you’re a power Twitter user).

  As you can see from the image on the right (click to see full size), results range from Twitters replies to Technorati results. Great way to know what’s being said about you. And about others with your name. Three of those results are for other “Ben Parrs”, one of them being a male supermodel who once played a stripper on T.V. This is not only very interesting (and strange) to know, but could be the key to explaining anything odd a future employer may find about you on Google.

Now, what if your name is a common name? That’s a little tougher. I suggest using a variation on your name that is not as common for your emails and internet interaction. For example, add in your middle initial, use Freddie instead of Fred, or use a nickname. You WANT to be easily searchable. Friends, employers, and potential customers all will search for you, and that’s an incredible opportunity to give them a good “first” impression. More on that in step 5.



2) Register your name as an internet domain

Read the rest of this entry »

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(thanks to Mazy for his help on this article)

Just three or four years ago, a person could have successfully managed separate online and offline lives (and yes, separate reputations). There was general anonymity to what you did on the internet. You could do the things you wouldn’t normally do in the real world on message boards and internet communities.





Not anymore.





I don’t care whether you’re a 40 year old business executive, a hot-shot entrepreneur, or a 16 year old power user on Digg; you need to control what’s being said about you on the internet or it will bite you in the ass.

You don’t need a high priced firm to help you do this. Hell, you can do a better job enhancing your image and putting out great content because, well, nobody else is you.

Without further ado, six ways to control and enhance your image on the Internet:


1) Search (and research) your name

It’s time to do your homework. You think you know everything about yourself, but you’re wrong. There are millions of people on the internet who have an opportunity to write about you, defame you, or even write about a person with the same name but could inadvertently damage your image. It’s time to do some searching.

• The first thing you must do is search yourself on Google. You’ve probably done it before out of curiosity, but now do it intelligently. Search your name, variations on your name, and all nicknames. For me, that would be “Ben Parr”, “Benjamin Parr”, and “Benjamin E. Parr”. When searching for your name, make sure you use quotation marks (” “) to make sure you aren’t getting results with only your first or your last name.

  Now that you’re searching, take note of anything relating to you. Are there any news articles that pop up? Any blog posts? Are they about you, or are you just being quoted? Does anyone who shares your name come up? Could people searching for you confuse that person with you? Generally, only the first page of search results matter, but I would look at the first twenty to thirty results to get a full picture of your image on Google.

  Repeat this every couple of weeks to track changes in search results.

• Second is to search for your name on Social Media Firehose. Social Media Firehose, built and hosted on Yahoo! pipes, searches specifically through social and networking websites. Kingsley Joseph’s tool will look through Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, and other social media websites for mentions of you. You can limit searches to exclude specific websites (I suggest removing Twitter if you’re a power Twitter user).

  As you can see from the image on the right (click to see full size), results range from Twitters replies to Technorati results. Great way to know what’s being said about you. And about others with your name. Three of those results are for other “Ben Parrs”, one of them being a male supermodel who once played a stripper on T.V. This is not only very interesting (and strange) to know, but could be the key to explaining anything odd a future employer may find about you on Google.

Now, what if your name is a common name? That’s a little tougher. I suggest using a variation on your name that is not as common for your emails and internet interaction. For example, add in your middle initial, use Freddie instead of Fred, or use a nickname. You WANT to be easily searchable. Friends, employers, and potential customers all will search for you, and that’s an incredible opportunity to give them a good “first” impression. More on that in step 5.



2) Register your name as an internet domain

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This Post!