Posted on October 10, 2008
Consistency With Your Online Identity
BY JAMES CLARK
Maintaining consistency with your online identity is one of those mundane, but effective strategies for building out your social media footprint.
If at all possible don't be JohnHucksCliffs on Delicious and JohnnyRockStar on Twitter. Try to keep your identity consistent across as many platforms as you can.
Sometimes that's easier said than done. Being graced with a common name like James Clark can have its benefits. For instance, I can pretty much go to any major sporting or entertainment event, walk up to the Will Call window and say, "Tickets for James Clark please", show my ID and I'm in. Now I won't admit to doing this, but for those of you with common names it's a plus.
But in the social media world it's a pain in the.....
A common name, be it personal or a corporate, is often difficult to come by for a username ID. So prior to setting up personal or company profiles, plug potential ID names into UserNameCheck.com and see what is available and what is taken.
Our recommendation is to make sure you're covered on the bigger sites:
Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter and YouTube.
So in case you're interested JohnHucksCliffs is very available:
Thats pretty nifty. I just checked a few of my common names, and they're mostly taken even if its not from me.
Guess i'll start over, and get a new identity!
Great resource James, I didn't know about that!