Musings For A Darkened Room

Would you like me to make it up so it fits within your script?
Tell you of our time between the sheets?
Tell you of the passion in our kiss?
I wish I could just to shut you up
Sadly none of it is real
I’d  tell you of the sweet taste of her sweat and the way her heart beating with mine feels

Are you ready to call out action?
Ready for quiet on the set?
So we can finally play this out the way it plays out in your head
Is this the part where I’m supposed to leave?
Or is this where we share a warm embrace?
With all these recent revisions I’m having trouble keeping pace

You’re the one directing tell me how and who I am
In this scene am I acting as the husband or am I the guy falling for his friend?
Quick tell me please I’m struggling to follow the lines that you have scribed
I’m quickly falling out of character and quickly losing sight of mine

Should I take this next scene improv?
Work on the story you’ve composed so far?
Should I take her by the hand as we run away beneath the stars?
She’ll leave hers and I’ll leave mine we’ll start our stories new
It leaves it open for a sequel, but in the script no role for you…

Let’s take this from the top
Do you even remember how we got here?
It was all fun and games and then someone got hurt
Now it’s less about us, and it’s more about her

So this time I’ll play the Alpha and you’ll be a beta
Isolated with your reflection to find comfort in yourself
Those who still care will feed you I’m sure
Not knowing you can’t be trusted, unaware it’s over her

I didn’t come here for a fight
Don’t you see I’m not a threat to you?
I’ve laid my weapons down and again I walk away
There’s no prize to be won here, and no glory that’s at stake.

In the end the spoils of war are never as grand as they appear
I already have what I need and it’s not something tangible you can take
So we can continue the round and round and you can continue to bare your arms
Or we can simply go our separate ways we’ve already caused some harm

What you seek isn’t going to be found in the spoils of this war
It’s already right in front of you, but you can’t see it through the smoke
See the it, is really she, and she is not something you can win
In fact she’s something you already have, but fail to appreciate from within.

First off, let me start out by saying I am in no way an expert at reputation management; nor have I spent hours researching the subject. With that said, there’s a chance that perhaps what I am about to say has been said before; if it has, then kudos to those whom blazed the trail before me. I am writing this based off of personal experience and observation. I’m not saying I’m right or wrong, just acknowledging what I’ve observed. If you feel the need to hear the gospel of reputation management from an expert, this is probably where you leave. For the rest of you, I hope you find some value in this as I know that I have.

When I think of reputation management the first thing that comes to mind is what others are saying about a person or their business. What clients are saying, what competitors are saying, and what other media sources are saying. But what most people probably don’t consider, is what it is they are saying about themselves online.

If you have friended or followed me on any of the various social profiles I manage, you probably know that I am a very candid person. I’m not sugar coated, I’m not filtered, and I don’t mind cracking jokes; even if they are at someone else’s expense. The fact of the matter is, I am who I am. I do this because even though I want people to see me as a professional, I also want them to see who I am as a person.

With social media becoming such a vital part of small business it’s important to properly represent yourself. You never know who may be looking at your business or profile; potential clients, potential partnerships, perhaps potential employees. If you portray yourself in your various social outlets as the serious sophisticated corporate type, yet you run your business in a casual mom and pop fashion you are already starting off your online relationships on the wrong foot. You are giving people a false sense of who it is they are dealing with. You would never market yourself as an orange salesman if you were selling apples, so why pretend to be what you’re not? Sure by showing your true colors you may scare off some of the higher end prospects, but in doing so you are capturing those who are most interested in what it is that you actually have to offer.

The value in this is that you in turn capture those who will work best with your business model and your personality. In my personal experience this has lead to some incredible collaborative efforts between me and my clients. Furthermore, it makes the overall process more comfortable for both parties. Your business relationships are much like your personal relationships, and if you can’t start out on a common ground there’s bound to be some bumps in the road.

In the end the most valuable take away from being yourself is that you know that the people you are interacting with are doing so because of who you are, not because of who you are pretending to be. By faking it you risk others seeing through your fake personality, and if you fall victim to your own faults, you risk tarnishing your online reputation and your business. Even more harmful would be exposing you’re a fraud in your face to face interactions. I know that I have developed opinions and ideas about certain people I interact with on social sites, and I know that I would be disappointed if at some point I met them in person and their online personality turned out to be nothing more than a façade.

One final thing to realize is that while being yourself you still need to keep a sense of professionalism. A lot of us use social media both professionally and personally, so there will be times when the two may cross paths and sometimes may even cross the line of appropriate. Rest assured this probably isn’t the end of the world. I have dropped my share of F-bombs and bad jokes on Twitter and Plurk and have still managed to maintain what online presence I do have. But it is still always something you need to be aware of.

Managing your reputation is an important aspect of running your business, but no one can destroy your reputation more than yourself. It doesn’t matter if all of your clients have given you high marks on their blogs and websites. If you misrepresent yourself their words are useless. People will take their personal experiences and opinions into consideration long before the ideas and opinions of others.

This week I decided to take a different approach with the Social Media Moment. Up to this point the posts I showcased have been funny moments. This week I decided to take a plurk from Anna Bourland that I thought had some really good subject matter and some solid feedback from other Plurk users. Anna discusses an article that she read offline about Social Media and how businesses should monitor it’s use.

Social media involvement has to be monitored to make sure your company goals are the focus.

I think this was a great post, and though ‘Audrey the Quotable’ again was in the running for this plurk. I wanted to go in a different direction this week. This weeks Social Media Moment has a great topic and I think any added feedback or thoughts you would like to share on this plurk would add to it’s value.

Finally, I remind you that you can alway feel free to contact me on Plurk or Twitter and let me know about something funny or interesting that you feel should be featured. I can only see so much, other users can be a great outside set of eyes.

So Crystal, one of the admins in the office, called me over to her desk today because she wanted me to look at something. I had assumed that there was a question about a link setup or perhaps a question about the setup of a Google Local account. To my surprise she was simply showing me a captcha from our friends at Google; and this is what it said:

I don’t know that it really needs an explanation, but if it does feel free to contact me and I’ll explain. I mean really Google…

One of the biggest muses of the social networking site Plurk is karma. Karma is obtained by using various aspects of the service, be it inviting friends, regular plurking, or leaving comments on other people’s plurks. The use of karma, which I assume is a way for the service to keep users active, is both a blessing and a curse. While higher karma graces you with various perks from the service, it also results in a timeline full of karma related plurks from other users.

“…been losing karma”, “…thinks my karma is stalled”, and “…getting close to going over 70 karma points” were all plurks that graced my timeline at various points today, all of which resulted in numerous responses about other people’s karma and their disappointment or excitement about it. But in the end what dose karma actually provide us? Sure you get some perks, but how many of those actually add value to the user experience.

Perhaps the most useful karma reward is achieved at 10 karma points. At 10 points you have the ability to personalize your timeline title. From a personalization aspect I think this is valuable, much like adding your age, location, etc., it gives you the ability to give other users an idea of who you are.

At 25 points you are rewarded additional emoticons, while these can add some fun visualization to the plurk timeline I really don’t think it adds any real value to the service. Furthermore the dancing banana was only funny the first 5 times.

The emoticon perks repeat again at 50 and again if you invite 10 of your friends to join. Again these simply add more flare to your posts and in some cases infect your timeline just as much as karma plurks do.

But perhaps the most useless, and in my opinion the one perk that could negatively affect your Plurk experience is achieved at 40 karma points. At 40 karma points you are given the ability to change your plurk display name. To me this is the most baffling concept to come out of a social site. You establish yourself as a specific individual with a specific display name for the first 40 karma points, and then can suddenly change your identity on a whim.

How might this hurt you? For starters anyone who friends you after you’ve changed your display name probably only knows you by that name. Because of this they are probably unaware that you were once JoePlurk, since your current display name is MightyJoePlurk. In turn they may use @MightyJoePlurk when they reference you, which sadly does not link back to your profile. Which brings us to another problem. Let’s say that someone wants to visit your profile, and they only remember you by the name MightyJoePlurk. If they use that in the profile URL they will be sent to a friendly screen featuring our friends in the A-Team.

Sure it’s amusing, but not when you are trying to find someone.

Clearly there is room for Plurk to rethink their karma rewards and provide something that can potentially enhance the user experience. First and foremost if you are going to allow people to choose a alternate display name, then at least make it so that if someone uses @displayname it links to the persons profile, the same should apply to the user URL.

Some additional ideas that stemmed from a plurk posted by bloggeries asking what people would want to see as added perks after 50 karma points included adding additional qualifiers to choose from, customizable qualifiers, and the ability to share karma with friends.

I think of these perhaps the most valuable from a user standpoint would be the additional, or customizable qualifiers. The qualifiers always make it easier to fit what you have to say in 140 characters by saving you a few characters at the beginning. In addition it allows you to express yourself in more ways. I think the ability to share karma, though a friendly gesture, would add to the karma whoring that already plagues people’s timelines.

I think the current perks provided to Plurk users add to the experience of plurking, but the value in them lacks. Especially when you look at the shortcomings of things like changing your display name.