Marketing Director

6 Steps to Launch your Digital Identity

This course will lay out from the start what is required to be successful in your own right using 'new tools' (social networking and social media) to fulfill your own goals. This course is about helping students to achieve what they are looking for from social networking and media. The course will be held at BCIT's Burnaby campus just east of Vancouver. See the course outline here. If you have any questions about the course contact me directly by email here.

This course will not be exclusively focused on business, personal or professional. The purpose is to lay out the benefits and uses of the tools and let students pursue their own goals with ongoing support and education. Within the class we will be creating a microcosm of what happens on social networks among the larger population and encouraging students to pursue that larger network from the start.

This course has come about as a result of my work in the Social Media realm dating back to 2008. I have been avidly reading everything I can get my hands on including more than a dozen books on the subject and it's related trends. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a great general look at 'the movement' and what it can achieve, for a more Twitter focused book pick up Shel Israel's Twitterville.

When deciding on a single book to use as a supplement to the course I wanted to find something that taught me things and made the path to achieve a strong presence in the new social media realm easy for anyone. For those reasons I have chosen Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's 'guidebook' Trust Agents.The book speaks to the business or professional user but it's lessons and tasks will help anyone looking to establish their digital identity.

A few weeks back I was speaking with a collegue who wanted to start building their professional presence online and these were the first 6 steps I gave him. These steps can be used or substituted for things you have already completed.

6 Steps to launch your digital identity
  1. Choose a name for your new digital identity. For the most success in a professional or business sense use your real name if possible (See Glenn Hilton). If you wish to remain anonymous use a nickname that describes in some way what you are trying to achieve (See Atomic Poet).
  2. Register for a Gmail account with "YourDigitalIdentity@gmail.com" if available. This will be the email you will use to sign up for everything else.
  3. Go to Twitter and sign up with the username "YourDigitalIdentity".
  4. Go to LinkedIn and start your LinkedIn Account. Use your real name. (See mine)
  5. Go to Go Daddy or any other low cost domain registrar and register the domain www.YourDigitalIdentity.com
  6. Go to Blogger or Wordpress and setup a blog. Make a few simple posts or even just titles. No one will find your blog until you want them to.
Do these things when you have time, a Saturday morning or need a short break from your work (not while at work though). Don't feel like you have to do them all at once. "Baby steps" as Richard Dreyfus' character famously explained to Bill Murray's in What about Bob?.
It's not a mountain if you climb it one step at a time. -Kemp Edmonds

1 comment:

  1. Hey Kemp, excited to hear you're teaching your first course. People will definitely want to get in on this one as I've been very impressed with your knowledge and approach to social media.

    ReplyDelete