First and foremost, you’ve got to be enthused about the internet. If you’re not into online, you won’t like this job. The fellow I spoke to who reckoned that billboards were the future, and who was disappointed in a previous job by having to choose banner advertising images from an archive - well, that’s not going to suit. And I know it’s tough to get an internship around now, let alone a job, but a scattershot apply-for-everything approach simply isn’t going to do you any favours.

Second, you need to back that enthusiasm up with an online presence. I want be able to get from your CV to your website or blog and your twitter account, and I want to see that you’re on Google+ and Facebook. LinkedIn is also a very good idea. Ideally, I want to be able to search for your name and have at least a few results on the first page that are you.

Third, you need to display a certain amount of good sense. I am not going to complain about a locked-down Facebook profile - that’s a good thing to see. I am going to mutter a bit if your Twitter account is private, particularly if you put the handle in your CV. I don’t mind what organisations you’re involved in, work for, or have done in the past - I just want to see that where you represented or posted about those groups, you did so well.

I also want to see interest in the areas that might be seen as more dull - analytics, text ads, spreadsheets. I don’t expect massive enthusiasm, but I want you to know how to use them to make things clearer, easier, and more efficient. This is information you can get for nothing online, mind - I don’t expect you have taken classes in statistics.

And the final thing I want to see is ideas. I don’t much care if they’re good ideas, really, but when I say to you, at an interview table, “Here’s a hypothetical client company. What could you do to market them online?” - I’m leaving the field wide open for you. “Well, I don’t know if I’d do online…” is one of the few wrong answers. Any idea will do; we’ll teach you to pick out the good ones, or if there are no good ones, to make the best of what’s there. But you’ve got to give us something to start with.

For those still reading, I’m going to assume that you can manage that time requirement, and I’m going to lay out in detail and in examples why doing your own SEO is better for you. I’m also going to assume that you have some knowledge of SEO - keyword research, title tags, and other basics, at least.

The most obvious and simplest way in which the DIY approach is better is that you know your own business better than I ever will. At the absolute best, I can give you about five days a month, in which I have to learn about your business and do the actual optimisation work. I’m almost certainly going to spend some of that time chasing down blind alleys, and finding that the electronic thingmajigit that gets so many searches is completely irrelevant to your handcrafted thingmajigit business - something you’d know at a glance.

This is true on the broad level, and also true on a very precise niche level. If I see something in the keyword research and site analytics that seems to indicate that auburn thingmajigit is a much more valuable term than red thingmajigit, I will very likely have no idea why. I can optimise for auburn, certainly. But without the business knowledge, it’s never going to occur to me that there’s more to be had by seeing how much better pistachio thingmajigit does than green thingmajigit, cerulean over blue, and so on.

(It’s clear that thingmajigits are interior design products, sought after by people who know about exact shades of colour, and who will pay a premium for one that matches their paint scheme.)

So apart from the blind alleys and the niche knowledge, what else can you do better than me? Well, you can write like someone who feels something about the subject. If I try to provide content for your website, I can provide content that is accurate, and optimised. The trouble is that there’ll be no soul in it, and that’s evident immediately to the reader. It may work at the technical level, and it might even improve your search engine ranking. But it won’t convince people to buy, it won’t provoke anyone into linking to it, and it certainly doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of “going viral”. What you want for that is a professional copywriter - which will cost you more again - or someone who knows about the subject, and has some strong feelings about the inherent superiority of the handcrafted thingmajigit.

And then there’s reaction time. If something appears in the news, and you know that people are going to be searching for a term relevant to your business, you can make the necessary changes to your site within minutes. By the time you call me, I call back because I was in a meeting, I understand the issue, and I find the time to make the changes, get you to approve them, and make them live - well, the moment won’t have passed, but there’ll certainly be lost opportunities. If, however, you know what to do, you can call me, get some quick advice on how to handle the changes, and have it all done in next to no time.

SEO is something you can teach yourself. I know; I taught myself. But it took me about three years of reading and practice and getting things wrong on test blogs, and generally making mistakes before I was ready to do anything useful with it. Proper training should allow you to shortcut that by a long way, and leave you in a state where you can do your own SEO, and only need the consultants for the really arcane, really difficult questions.

The points I’m laying out here are, in essence, the very basic elements of reputation management, but I’m looking at this from the point of view of an individual rather than a business or a brand. It’s both easier and more difficult - easier because people will still hesitate a little before going after a named person, when they won’t wait a second before shouting down a brand, and more difficult because a brand is recognised as being the sum of efforts of many people, and what one person does doesn’t always affect the brand in the longer term.

So, the most central point here is that you have to own your name. Go search for your own name on Google now. There are three possible outcomes from this.

One: All you can see are results about other people with the same name. This is kind of unfortunate, but it does let you hide in the crowd. It’s a common problem in Ireland; there are dozens of Paddy Murphys, Maire Byrnes, Sean Nolans,  and Mary O’Connors. Or there’s someone famous who has the same name as you, like Michael Jackson, who lives down the road from my father. If this is the case, your reputation online is obscured. Nobody can be easily sure that it’s your profile they’re looking at. On the one hand, that could be useful. On the other, if you’re trying to build your reputation and profile, it can be a nuisance, and you pretty much need to find some sort of handle or pen name.

Two: The results are about you, but they’re things other people wrote. Listings of your attendance at conferences, local newspaper articles, mentions in your church newsletter from when you volunteered to cut the grass, and so forth. This is, in reputation terms, better than option one, but it’s still under other people’s fairly arbitrary control. If you’re a bit more famous, that becomes an even stronger case. Your reputation is uncontrolled.

Three: All of most of the results on the first page are about you and under your control. You’re seeing social media profiles, your blogs, your company profile, and other things you wrote and can change. This is the best of all possible worlds, because in this case no reputation assassin can touch you. Any profile they try to establish can be compared to your real profile, and shown to be fake. And that’s so obvious that nobody will try it. Your reputation is controlled.

So what do you need to do to get to a controlled reputation? Well, you need to have current profiles on social media, a blog or two, a profile on your company’s About Us page, and so on. If your name is a common one, you can adopt a handle or nickname, or you can try to beat back all your like-named fellows to the point where you dominate the search engine result pages.

But you can’t have a profile on every social media network ever! Well, no, you can’t. You only need a few, really. At present, if you have an account on Facebook and one on Twitter, one on LinkedIn, a blog of some sort - any sort - and a mention on the pages of whatever company you work for or run, that should cover you.

The trouble arises when things change. A new social network arises, your blog isn’t updated for a few months, and the next thing is that you’re back in outcome two - and you’ve left information about yourself out there that a competent reputation assassin can pick up and use. Our unfortunate friend Wilhelm from last week’s post is in exactly this situation.

Establishing the profiles is not enough. You need to engage in the media, update the blog, and generally appear online. The only way to control your reputation is to… well, take control of it. You need to move into new social media networks as soon as they become visible in the ”old media”, or get mentioned heavily on existing social media (so right now, you should be looking at Pinterest, for instance) and make sure your name is protected there. You have to write, or at least collate material other people have written. This is not, of course, just a matter of protection - it’s also promotion and self-marketing.

Esssentially, what I’m saying is: you can no longer sit back and not engage. You can’t be invisible anymore. Like it or not, people are going to look for you, and it is massively in your interest to make sure that what they find is actually you.

Imagine, for a moment, that there is some new business model in Ireland. Maybe it has appeared because of policy decisions at the state level, maybe it’s due to new technology, or perhaps it’s just a local implementation of something happening worldwide. Anyway, there are companies being set up, or expanding into this space.

Companies, particularly in the very early days of a new concept, are based around people. And if one of the people involved isn’t, shall we say, all that ethical, he can do significant damage to his rivals - especially if they’re not social media users - online. Of course, he won’t want to do this himself; he’ll hire someone. Pay them in cash - not a lot, this isn’t complex work - and then deny everything. Maybe not even give the person doing the dirty work his real name. Here’s how it could happen.

Our reputation assassin is in his early twenties. Let’s give him a name, something unlikely so I won’t get accused of slander. Ruadhri Hitachi, say. Social-media-savvy, brought up on Bebo and then Facebook, had his own domain name since he was 15 and made some money from Adsense and link sales to help himself through college. He probably didn’t do a computer science degree, maybe something in the business or economics line. He knows his stuff, and he’s getting a few grand in cash from our anonymous businessman for this service. He has the name of his target - let’s call him Wilhelm Lebowski - and not a lot more.

So first, Ruadhri goes out and buys a smartphone or a small laptop, gets a pay-as-you-go SIM or 3G modem, and does some research from that. He establishes that Wilhelm is in his late 40s, really got started during the early dot com boom and got out with money in hand. He’s spent his time since in various management positions, and while he’s in IT, it’s been from the business side, and he hasn’t really got into social media. He has a Facebook profile, which has been dormant for 18 months, an old bebo profile, and maybe a personal home page that he hasn’t touched in ten years, linked to a Picasa account where he uploads pictures once a year after his family summer holiday in Portugal, if he remembers.

The second thing Ruadhri does is find a coffee shop or pub or the like near Wilhelm’s office, and starts his work from there. This is important for a couple of reasons; we’ll look at those as we go. He creates an email address - wilhelmtlebowski@gmail.com, or some other plausible variation on Wilhelm’s name. Using this, he creates a new Facebook profile in Wilhelm’s name. He doesn’t do a whole lot with it; he fills in some very basic information, and he uses Wilhelm’s old profile to find a few other low-activity contacts to add as friends. He might look for other contacts of Wilhelm’s, too - co-workers from somewhere Wilhelm worked ten years ago, and so on. Not the kind of people with whom Wilhelm is in frequent contact, mind. He also puts up a link to Wilhelm’s personal homepage and current company.

He then leaves that for two or three weeks, and then he fetches a bunch of Wilhelm’s photos from Picasa, and uploads them. At the same time, he adds a link to the old bebo profile, and posts a status update that says something like ”Still can’t remember the old account details - hello again”.

Over the next several months, Ruadhri will log in once or twice a week, do some Facebook-ish things in Wilhelm’s name, and flail around a little in the way familiar to all of us when someone new appears on social media. He might, after a couple of months, create a Twitter account, link it to the Facebook profile, follow a few business accounts relevant to Wilhelm’s interests, and do nothing else with it. Sometime around now, he connects to a journalist or blogger or two who have interests in Wilhelm’s business. Gradually, he ramps up the activity, always posting from that same device, and always from near Wilhelm’s office or home. He interacts a little, but not much, with people peripheral to Wilhelm’s friends and contacts. He might even - since he’s probably physically seen Wilhelm a few times now, and knows where he is - use the “check in” function at Wilhelm’s office, home, or known holiday destinations. This is the first reason for the choice of location. As soon as Wilhelm updates with his next set of pictures on Picasa, Ruadhri duplicates them on Facebook.

And then he posts something absolutely awful on “Wilhelm’s” account. Something illegal, immoral, and disgusting. A picture, say. I’m sure your own mind has supplied some possibilities by now. He’ll collect a few more such pictures and keep them on the smartphone or laptop, too, and continue to add to that collection on and off over the next few weeks or months. He posts this picture at 03:33, and he deletes it again at 08:45. Then around 10 o’clock, he uploads another picture, something bland and inane like the street outside the office, and captions it with “something wrong with the photo upload on this, random stuff I didn’t post appearing”. 

He then sits tight. If anyone comments in any way about the deleted picture, he repeats his accusation of random stuff appearing, and then stops posting for two weeks. If, however, any of the journalists react, he’ll go into the Final Steps, which I’ll detail below.

If there’s no sign of anyone having noticed, he’ll gradually “reappear” after the two weeks, and provide more background activity. A little later, he’ll do the post-and-delete thing again, always late at night. He might have to repeat this a few times, but sooner or later, one of the journalists will see it. He might have to create a second dummy account to bring it to their attention, but that’s not hard. And as soon as he knows the journalist has seen this terrible, awful picture, he goes to the Final Steps.

Final Step one is to delete the Facebook profile. Final Step two is to wrap the smartphone or laptop in a waterproof bag and hide it, badly, behind Wilhelm’s office. Final Step three is for Ruadhri to walk away, and not look at that case ever again.

You can see how this can play out. It might sink without a trace, of course, but it’s pretty likely that the journalist will follow up. They might have taken a screenshot, they might snoop around and find the laptop, they might bring it to the police. And if the laptop gets looked at, what will be visible will be posts from Wilhelm’s home and office, a parcel of illegal content on the hard drive, and a lot of identifying information.  Even though none of this is true, Wilhelm’s reputation is pretty likely to take a battering. And his business will be affected by that, and our original unethical anonymous businessman benefits.

That’s pretty horrific, in a business and personal sense. It is, however, easy to prevent - if Wilhelm has an active presence on Facebook, a working Twitter account, and uses Pinterest for his pictures of Portugese architecture and sea views, Ruadhri has no plausible space to slip into. Indeed, if Wilhelm is keeping an eye on his own name online, he’ll be able to nip this whole process in the bud, before it ever becomes threatening.

Next week, I’ll talk through the basics of actually doing that; protecting your own online reputation.

At one end of the scale, you can post a one-line throwaway from your phone as you get on the train like “Seventh day in a row of rain!” and you get a  multitude of replies, responses, jokes, responses to those, and they cascade so that next time you look, there’re fifty responses. And at the other end, you post a carefully crafted, honed piece of writing which has taken you days of thinking and hours of writing to put together, which has nuance and effect, and not a single extraneous word, and what’s that? Not a single response.

There’s a simple reason for this, of course. People want to respond in kind. Nobody wants to post a joke, a snappy response, or a TV reference in response to your masterpiece - they look like a bit of an idiot. It’s like getting up on stage after Leonard Cohen and trying to do something involving toilet humour and sock puppets. They may mean to respond “later” with something well-thought out, but we all know what happens to later on the internet. Most likely they’ve provided some silent applause in their heads, and then gone on with what they were doing - enriched and educated by what you wrote, but not actually showing it in any way you can see.

This frustrates me, as you can no doubt tell. What gets me even more is that these people, when they see you, will go “that was brilliant!” and proceed to have a long conversation about your writing and the topic, which is promptly lost because it’s a conversation a month after you’d written the post, a month after they’d read it, happening at a bus stop or a party, and nobody’s even thinking of taking notes. If you’re going to give me opinions and feedback and responses, I want to have them where I can see them!

I describe all of this as the “effort curve”. But what I’ve described above is a linear relationship - the more effort, the less response - not a curve, and certainly not the s-curve I’m thinking of. That line is the bit in the blue box in this illustration:

Graphing Effort against Response

As you can see, the curve happens when you consider the ends of that line, the points where it starts to go the other way. At the far left, as it were, is the content so bad that nobody responds to it. The fifteenth badly composed Instagram picture of the Eiffel Tower. The off-colour joke that nobody wants to dignify with a response. The overlaboured hashtag pun. We know all those, and at some level, we can’t help identifying the high-effort posts with those - “nobody responded, they must think it’s awful!”. There’s not a lot you can do for that, other than recognise the effect.

There are two things that can escape this curve. One goes out at the right-hand end of your graph - content so good that people cannot help but respond. And the other goes through it, in a way you can’t represent without a third axis, presenting content that is so controversial that people… can’t help but respond. The former is probably what you want in the long term, but the latter is a tool that you can use, carefully, to build a brand. It’s a pretty blunt tool, though, and like most blunt tools, there’s a considerable risk of it slipping and cutting you. So I don’t like using it.

At present, I’m doing a lot of thinking about how to identify the content that will get out at the right-hand end of the curve. I know it’s there; my day-to-day work is, broadly, too successful for there not to be some useful concepts in there that I can teach to others. It’s how to shape it so that it flies off the end of that curve into rapturous, written applause; that’s the question.

Pinterest is free. It’s invitation only, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of limitation on the number of people you can invite. So the only cost to the user is the time to get an invitation, and the time to actually make use of it. It has no advertising, and has a nice clean interface. I’m not always too impressed with the way it processes information, but I recognise the symptoms as being a consequence of load-balancing, and since they’re growing quickly, that’s entirely forgivable.

However, they have to make money somehow, and the usual social media approach of selling the users’ demographic data (or indirect access to it) isn’t always viewed favourably. So what they’ve done is sign up for every affiliate program they can find, and insert their affiliate code into links where possible. Personally, I don’t see a problem with this.

The issue, however, seems to be that some users were using their own affiliate codes in links, and depending on the strong “re-pin” effect in Pinterest to spread it around and make them some money. There’s a bit of panic going on that those affiliate codes are being replaced with Pinterest’s. Experiments by Joel Garcia show this is not the case. To be honest, that seems downright generous on Pinterest’s part. People posting affiliate links there are doing so on a free service, and not paying anything for hosting or promotion.

So the issue seems to be around disclosure. I suppose it’s a fair point, but in comparison to what Facebook are in the general habit of doing with user data, it seems a pretty minor thing on Pinterest’s part. It’s definitely not worth uproar.

So, yesterday was the occasion of the eircom all-Ireland eGovernment Symposium, and we had some really fantastic speakers, and great attendance. Last year, I gave myself sore thumbs by tweeting (from an iPhone) non-stop through the day, but I was shouting into the void a bit - there were about 25 other tweets about the symposium all day. This year, up to this morning, there were 165 tweets with the official #iegovsym hashtag, and that’s leaving out my livestreaming on the @irelandgov account.  So that’s a 660% increase over last year.

Looking more closely at that, some of the tweets posted were spam. That brings down the signal to noise ratio by a bit, but it’s also a marker of success - in order for the spambots to pick up the hashtag, it had to be trending in Ireland. So for some measure of time yesterday, a bit before lunchtime, #iegovsym was appearing as a trending topic right across Ireland.

There are a few factors in this. First up, the theme of the symposium was “social media”. That’s probably a reason right there for the amount of Twitter traffic. But there was also a much, much higher number of mobile devices in the room. Dan and I were hammering away on our iPads, and I could see four more in the rows near us. There were smartphones all over the place, and there were people who weren’t there commenting as well.

There’s a fairly broadly accepted rule of thumb that for every comment you get, there are twenty silent readers (well, some people say a hundred - I think that’s optimistic). I’d reckon it’s fair to say, though, that you get ten times as many people looking with interest as you get tweets using the hashtag. So that would mean that - not counting my live tweets - there were about 1650 people paying attention to the symposium.

That makes a pretty strong case for the worth of social media.

However, I was at a briefing this morning given by the Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, wherein he was describing the impacts of these changes in regulation on the marketing industry in general. Most of his updates had to do with direct mail and phone calls, but I was able to ask about Google Analytics in particular, and how it might be possible to implement cookies for that, legally.

He was very definite about the notion that in any case, the opinion of the Data Protection Commission is that Analytics’ cookies fall very close to the “not a problem” end of the spectrum. However, he was also able to tell us that he’d very recently received a notification from Google directly that they’d be rolling out adjustments very shortly to bring the use of cookies in Analytics into line not just with EU regulation, but also with German law, which is quite strict on such things.

I’ve since had that confirmed by people in Google - the changes they’re making are mostly to do with opt-out functions and geodata scrubs - but the upshot is that Analytics will remain perfectly legal. That’s a very definite relief for me, as it’s one of my single most important tools.

If you’re going to use social media for marketing, then you have to use social media yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to make yourself look like an idiot, as you flail through the process of learning while representing a business, or worse, just don’t learn. And to use social media, you have to sit down and deal with them every day. In fact, it has to become a habit, like checking your email.

It really only becomes evident to me how habitual my social media use is when one of my networks is down. Livejournal, which is an old, well-established network, with little business use (except by genre writers, but that’s a whole different area) has been suffering a DDOS attack for the last few days. This has two effects; first, the one where I hit the LJ tab in my browser, and then wonder why it’s not working, and second, all my other networks are sprouting posts that go “LJ is down, so I’m posting here instead”. Now, with both of these going on, I know LJ is down, but I still keep going to that tab to look at what’s new there.

The same thing happens with Twitter, with Google+, and with all the other networks and network tools I use on a daily basis. And because of this habitual use, I know how it works - I know what’s annoying, what works well, which posts are likely to be RT’d, reshared, or otherwise passed on, and which ones will get responses. This isn’t something you can learn from a presentation or book, or keep a cheat sheet on, because it changes. It will keep on changing, too - what was ‘correct’ two months ago is not going to work now, and the things that will work well in two months don’t even exist now.

If you want to use social media for your business, you have to use social media yourself. Get in the habit.

So, what is it? Well, it’s Google’s latest attempt at a social network. And rather than the new functionality of Wave, or the near invisibility of Buzz, it’s basically a copy of Facebook’s functionality - so much so that it’s surprising. However, there are some important differences, and I think they’ll become more important in the longer term. Whether they’ll lead to success or not is another matter entirely, of course.

First and foremost, where Facebook defaults to sharing all the input you give it with whoever will listen, Plus defaults to setting up “circles”, such as Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, and so on, straight off the bat. And then you choose which circles each piece of data you add goes to.  Facebook can do this, but it’s functionality that was added much later, and which is not easily evident. People can’t see what circles they’re in, only that you have them in some circle or circles. They can, however, see a list of the other people who can see a given post.

Second, it has none of the annoying games, quizzes, and spam-producing applications for which Facebook is notorious. This makes a vast difference in the overall signal to noise ratio.

Third - and this is a subtle one - where Facebook has “like”, Plus has “+1″. This is more important than it seems, because a lot of the feedback one could give on Facebook is stymied by the semantic discomfort of clicking “Like” on a line that says “2000 killed by earthquake”, or “My dog died last night”. But the “+1″ communicates much more effectively that you feel the content is important, worth marking as such, rather than that you approve of it.

Plus is a sensible blend of technologies, terminologies, and sensitivities to privacy. It has the gradation of access from Livejournal, the ease of use that Facebook could have, if it had been properly designed, an underlying technological robustness, and very low barriers to entry, since it’s integrated with existing Google accounts.

So, it’s technically solid, but will it take off? Can it challenge Facebook? That depends. I’m bad at predicting these things, because the technical solidity means more to me. I reckoned Wave was the business, and didn’t think at first that Twitter would get anywhere - so wrong on both counts. On the other hand, I didn’t think Orkut would rise to much, and I was pretty sure Buzz would remain mostly invisible, so I haven’t been altogether wrong.

Here, in any case, is my set of predictions: Plus will never be as big as Facebook, but it will be better, and have a more loyal following. It will also be easier to monetise, which will help it immensely.

Let me deal with those in order. It will never be as big, because Facebook has now expanded to a huge number of people who have very little concept still of how the internet really works. They won’t move to Plus because they won’t really know it’s out there. Maybe some of them will move eventually, and maybe they won’t. Either way, they aren’t the core audience Plus is aiming for.

On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly part of that core audience. You have an awareness of marketing and a notion of how the internet works. You have some concept of which information you want to keep private or limited, and which you’re willing to release into the world. You’ll use Plus because you know it’s better, and that makes a difference to you.

These technically informed circles are the people Google need to reach with plus, because we’re the people to whom they can offer advertising that works best. Google will monetise Plus, there’s no question of that. But they’ll do it with subtle, sensible ads, targeting keywords and demographics in a very, very precise manner, like they do with gmail today - except more so. There will be a point where you are never offered an ad that doesn’t have some appeal to you, either on a basis of want or need.

Facebook, I reckon, will be left as the place in which you communicate with more distant people - relatives you don’t often see or deal with, school friends, neighbours from three houses ago, and so on. Plus will be where your core networks, your closest circles, end up.