ION Digital

As mentioned earlier, we got hit with a lot of questions at the Cisco Partner conference about separating online business and personal interests and identities. People are worried about looking stupid in front of their business clients and associates by revealing too much of their personal lives.

Example: One middle aged man had just set up a Facebook account, primarily for business, and was stunned to find out his business contacts or “friends” could now easily click over to his teenage son’s profile and see his latest antics. “It’s the last thing I wanted them to see,” he said, “pics of him partying and acting stupid.” (more…)

Several people at last week’s Cisco Partner Velocity 09 conference in Miami (the Web 2.0 skills training sessions) asked us how they could separate their online personal and professional activities. They worry that the two worlds would overlap as they moved deeper into social media, with embarrassing results.

Others worry they’ll just say something that will backfire;
either way it hurts their reputations.
This is a growing issue, thanks to the way social media is evolving. Facebook is a crazy quilt of personal and business
interests and activities, which all flow through the personal news-streams. And on Twitter, rapid fire observations and comments may seem honest—that’s the idea, right?—but come back to haunt you (see Ketchum example below). It’s the dark side of the transparent web.

The good news is there are actions you can take to manage your online identity, while keeping your  business and personal presences separate (for the most part). This post will look at what you post, your content. (more…)

After posting my favorite Twitter articles earlier this week, several corporate managers I work with quizzed me about it. What’s Twitter? What’s that about? Some seem to wonder what’s going on behind the Twitter curtain. What are all those people doing?
But most of all, they want to know what can it do for me?

The answer is: a lot. It’s still early in the game for Twitter but you can already see the potential for businesses. Twitter is a fascinating, raging river of comments, observations, opinions, links and more—Facebook on steroids—and provides a potentially powerful tool for communications and other professionals, from sales and marketing to product development.

I’ve only been on Twitter a few months, but already I can see the potential for it on so many levels–as a tool for communications, to build brands and manage customer relations, just to name three. More on these later. But, for starters, it may be best to think of Twitter as a listening and research tool, even a new form of news service—both which are just starting to be appreciated.  (more…)

Twitter continues to explode in popularity. One estimate has it growing 752% in 2008, hitting 4.3 million unique visitors in December.  It picked up more than 1 million unique visitors in December alone,and by all accounts, the growth is continuing, and possibly accelerating. I’m working on a couple of pieces about Twitter for business users,  but wanted to share some of the cool posts I came across in January–my favorites– and some useful tools.