Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video
Full English Text Transcription (Video is below)
Hi guys, this is Robin Good for Master New Media answering your key questions received from my email inbox at robin.good at masternewmedia.org and focusing mostly on professional online publishing and related topics.
This time I’ve got an interesting request from you about,
“Let’s say that I want to create a strong online identity; how do I do that? Is it all about having a fancy name like yours? Is it so?”
Well, that’s a great question, I think.
Let’s refocus it. The topic is ‘Online Identity’. How do you build one? Is it about the name? Is it about the content? Is it about the overall personality, impression, and feeling that you give out?
Well, it’s probably about all of these things. So, an online identity is not so much built by thinking up a fancy, memorable name that reflects who you are and what you’re trying to do, BUT it can also be enabled by that.
I think, in fact, I generally suggest to people who are opening a new blog not to start with their name because the blog name is quite important, and nobody’s gonna search for your name outside of your own friends.
So if your focus is on video publishing, call your blog ‘Video publishing by Jerry O’Hara,’ but you know, put video publishing as the main thing there because that’s the topic you’re talking about.
So many times, people are trying to build an online identity, thinking that this is something that they can strategize from the very beginning. I don’t think this is the case, and it wasn’t the case with me.
I mean, Master New Media was out there before Robin Good existed for a long time until I realized I wanted to have an identity that the person behind Master New Media was, for many people, more important than the Master New Media brand, realizing the Master New Media was not easy to memorize and to spell out again and to pronounce for many people, to this day.
And also, knowing that my name was very long and complex and easy to pronounce for people who were not from my country.
Then, I put that mechanism in place. But otherwise, you should always think that first, you should do something valuable and good and great, and then once you’ve done that, you were probably going to develop your own identity and personality naturally, to which you can inject more character, a better name, and soul but you can’t really build a personality by deciding a fancy name or a cool logo.
That character and the identity is a result of something you do, not just of a name you have.
I mean, it can be as fancy and as memorable as you want, but unless it is deeply and strongly and repetitively associated with something that characterizes, that matches up, that reinforces that name in some way, then it’s gonna have no value.
So Robin, “How am I going to build my online identity?” Well, you build your online identity by bringing out the best you’ve got about the thing you’re most passionate about, and you’ve decided to cover on your site, on your news magazine, on your blog, or whatever you’ve got.
You should come out by using your singular pronoun for yourself and not always talk like you’re a team.
Come out yourself, show your face, say what you think, take a stand, defend some people who are not in an easy position, challenge somebody, and bring in tremendous gifts to your audience! That’s what you can do to build an online identity no matter what’s your name; that’s really how you can do it.
By having a conversation with them, not just publishing stuff, putting content out there, but trying to come out as a direct human being.
There are some special traits, whatever they are, that you scream all the time, that you complain all the time, that you find only the greatest tools and are always amazed by them, and you analyze why they can be so great.
Whatever that is, give space to a personality to give out and THAT’S how you can build a strong online identity.
Robert Scoble didn’t think up its name. Why does he have such a strong online identity? Well because he has dedicated his recent life just to this. To share, to give to other people, to go explore, make mistakes, get criticized, get squashed by other people who don’t appreciate what he does, and not defend, not try to fight but just try and try and hopefully learn something out of all this.
That’s the way I think anyone, without expecting to become as popular as Robert Scoble, can develop a tangible memorable, unique online identity.
It’s not in the name, it’s in what you do, that’s what I strongly think and I recommend you do. This is all.
Originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on Wednesday, 10 December 2008, as, “Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video”
Robin Good
