January 14, 2010

A Crisis of Identity in the Digital Age

Hi, my name is Craig, and I create content. Between gabbing about industry trends, waxing political, songwriting and recording music, not to mention posting sporadic updates to my status on myriad social networking sites, I am out and about on the WWW. Not as much as some, but of late, the ingest/output ratio has definitely started becoming more balanced. So here’s what’s bouncing around in my noodle this AM...

Branding. Establishing a personal brand. Establishing a personal stake/title/place. How is it that the various pieces of me add up as they are presented in various publication channels? An overwhelming majority of people that encounter me do so through some large degree of separation-- a comment on a blog, a tweet, an overheard comment on the street. And how does that tie into a conversion, in the marketing sense? How do I engage someone with my personal brand? How do I bring someone from passive contact to more active engagement? How do I hook people in?

I suspect this is a crisis that faces many publishers today as they look at the puzzle of brand identity in this dawning age of mash-ups, aggregation and social publishing. Readers have a number of tools available to them to browse, peruse and review content in different ways. RSS feeds, digital subscriptions, link handoffs and aggregator re-posting of articles. At what point does that piece of content lose its association with its parent? Or how does the content creating brand reel people in who’ve been hooked? All roads don't necessarily point to Rome and you can't always guarantee your contact/action info is associated with your content.

The dilemma is between casting a wide enough web to gain exposure and thereby attract users, and spreading yourself so thin that there is little to no actionable connection between your content and your brand. After all, once you get past meta-meta-meta, if you're not doing lo-fi hipster experimental dirge rock, you might be too far removed from the source to be discernable.

In some ways tools like Shazam are a great way to handle this. If I'm an anonymous Indie artist, but have done due diligence in making sure my songs are slurped by Shazam's tagging engine, then if some random passerby hears my song in an elevator, they can use the app to figure out song name, artist name, and get a link to buy. It's a great tool to reverse-lookup, and helps bring people back to your brand without needing specific attribution.

When it comes to other types of content, you're much more at the mercy of whatever site you are posting to as to how engaged users can come back for more. So. What's the solution?

Some people espouse the "if you love it, let it go" model, and hope that by having enough content out there without too many strings attached, and trust in the magic of the interweb, that those people you've "hooked" will find their way back to you. Others take a much more proprietary stance, and don't want to expose their own content anywhere except on domains/venues they control. While they can dictate the rules of engagement, what fun is it hosting a party that no one knows about? While Google can do a lot of heavy lifting, it's not the best for giving a total picture. Search on your name or one of your core key phrases and you'll see the fragmented picture that comes back at you.

I have been toying with a third model, effectively a self-managed link-trade approach. I'm not as strategic about where my content gets posted to, but make sure that I always point to it from my home "brand" page and try to cross-refer back home from any other sites. If I post a comment or am involved in some interesting discussion, I'll microblog about it, giving up the link to the site where the discussion is happening, but adding additional context/comment where the material lives on my own page. I use twitter for this, and using special hashtags, will automatically ingest and file the tweets back to my website, where I can then go in and add more detail, should I be so inclined. While this adds a small amount of overhead to my workflow, I think that in presenting my home page as a useful aggregation site, doing some pay-it-forward by allowing link-outs from my site to others' content, and letting my content have a slightly longer leash, I am working on growing my brand, while keeping a central hub that remains connected. That way users following up based on some off-site link or point of interest have that much more of a chance to find my core brand.

There's a lot of ways to crack this nut-- let's chat about it. Please use the comments below to share your stories and reactions.

-Craig McEldowney

Posted at 09:30 pm by DPCI Bloggers

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