When dealing with the online world, your name is everything. Having a unique name for your product, service or yourself will help you to be found easily in search engines and on social networks.

I was surprised last January, when on Friday the 13th, I was followed on Twitter by someone with the same name as my sister. It being not all that uncommon a name, there was some momentary confusion on my part that ended with a great DM chat and a new friend made.

Things got even stranger that Friday the 13th when I was followed by “Adele McAlear.” What!?!

My last name has an unusual spelling, the result of a spelling error by immigration officials in the 1840′s when an ancestor from Ireland named McAleer came ashore. My first name is also not common (that is until that other Adele started sweeping Grammy awards, netting me a slew of followers on Twitter who are clearly chasing the wrong Adele.)

Only once before in my life had I encountered another person with my name: A woman with the first name Adele who married a distant cousin, lived in a town a few hours away, and had a low profile online. When I first discovered her 10-years-ago, the concept of another person having my name was so bizarre to me that I briefly thought I was a victim of identity theft.

The Adele McAlear (@Adeley90) who followed me on Twitter back on that odd Friday the 13th, lives in Glasgow and was given this name at birth 20-odd years ago. She is friendly and doesn’t appear to have a large digital footprint. What’s more important, from a search point of view, she is not in the same line of work.

But what do you do when you are neck and neck in Google results with someone who has the same name and they are in a similar business? Well, if you’re my buddy Mark Goren, you discover that the other Mark Goren and you have so many uncanny similarities that you befriend them and work together.

5 Name Search Tools for Social Networks

What if you are launching a new startup or business service? Clearly, you’ll be checking trademarks in the US and Canada. But, almost more importantly, you’ll be checking for domain names. So many domain names are taken that  companies turn to alternate spellings of common words, made up words, and unusual TLDs, like .ly (Libya). One of my favourite tools for alternate domain name suggestions is the NameBoy.com search tool, which not only gives alternate spellings, but pairs your chosen words with others that you many not have considered.

When looking to find where else your name may be online, and in particular on social networks, try these tools.

NameChk.com searches 159 of the most popular social sites. They also have an iPhone app. A test run on my own name showed about a 20% error rate. Free.

KnowEm.com searches 590 social sites, 150 domain name registries and the USPTO registry. Thy  have a USPTO search app for Android and an automated service to secure your name and add your profile on up to 300 social networks. Paid and free levels.

PeekYou.com is heavily supported by advertising. The ability to search by country, province/state makes narrowing your search for common names a bit more effective. It plugs into other services offering public records and background checks, phone book, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, photo albums, online documents and other tidbits. I found lots of obscure references to my name here with many yielding false and incorrect results. Paid and free levels.

Spokeo.com searches social, blogs, dating, photo, music, video, review and shopping sites. You can also reverse email search and reverse phone search. I remember seeing this service back in 2007 and how uncomfortable it made me feel then. Although it has many of the elements that other online name search sites does, the inclusion of dating, review and shopping sites makes it a little too much like personal stalking for my comfort level. Paid service.

DuckDuckGo.com is a simple, uncluttered search engine that does not use a recommendation algorithm when serving results. When you search on Google or Bing, your previous searching history is used to determine which results should be served to you. This ends up (un)naturally skewing any searches you make with information that Google or Bing thinks you might want, not necessarily what you should see. DuckDuckGo does not track or bubble what you search for, which yielded me some very interesting results that I’d not seen previously. Free.

So, when you are looking to secure a new name for a business or service, or are doing vanity searches for your own monitoring and reputation management, what tools do you use?

Thanks to Twitter friends for their contributions: @MassimoFarina, @LBT, @jimmyrey, @anthonymarco, @ChicagoLeah , @SylviaTan, @Pakoken, @duanebrown, @prsarahevans, @lachances.

It’s clear that there are plenty of dentists just taking their first steps in the digital space and evaluating where to start in social media. I was impressed by how much some were doing, including one attendee who is actively using boards in Pinterest in addition to other social networks and blogging.

Overwhelmingly, there is a concern about reputation management, particularly when negative reviews are found on sites like Yelp and Google Places, as well as on review sites that can only be viewed behind a pay wall.

And, like many small businesses, they are struggling with how to manage it all, particularly when marketing is not their chosen area of expertise. My advice to the attendees, and any small business, is to start small and with a plan. Before you start think about these 5 Ws:

• what you are trying to accomplish,
• why are you different,
• who you are trying to reach,
• when is the best time to reach them, and
• where should you reach them

Establish these things before jumping into Facebook, Twitter or any other social media tools. Start slowly, choose one channel, and experiment while learning the ropes. Only roll out other channels when you know that you have the time to keep up with them.

Here’s my presentation from today’s session. (It was 3 hours long, so be forewarned.) It should be useful for any small or medium-sized business wading into the social space, or for those looking to ramp up their efforts a notch.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Au revoir Montréal, Hello Toronto

It became apparent very early this year that I would be moving to Toronto. Looking for my next job was a numbers game: The amount of available jobs for someone at my career level was three-times more in Toronto than in Montreal.

For me, the pool of opportunities in Montreal shrinks even more when factoring in my French-as-a-second-language proficiency. Any gig I take in Montreal would have to be focused on English-language markets, and those are in short supply.

From the moment my last blog post went live, I was in the exceedingly fortunate position of fielding calls from people interested in exploring opportunities. They were all in Toronto and they were diverse, challenging and incredibly interesting.

Over the past 10 weeks, one company emerged as the best fit for me; A fabulous digital agency with an international presence, high-profile clients, and an incredibly talented team at the helm. I was particularly eager to work alongside the amiable and down-to-earth executive leading up the strategy and social side.

On Monday morning of last week, we discussed the offer and everything was agreeable. I had my start date and was waiting to sign off on the formal offer which would be in hand by the end of the week. Preparations to move were under way. I made calls to the Toronto school board, sent emails about rental properties, and started cleaning out cupboards.

My husband was completely on board about moving and was really excited about starting a new chapter in our lives. We were just waiting on the signed offer before telling our 7 year-old daughter the news that would change her life.

Putting on the Brakes

Then, on Monday night, out of the blue, my husband was offered a new job based in Montreal. Not just any job, but one that would turbo-boost his career. He’d be taking on some cutting edge technology in a rare environment. It would be a learning and growth opportunity that he would not find again. In the long-term, this job would elevate him to another level entirely.

For 48-hours we hashed out our options, asking the what-ifs, the whys, and the what-abouts. In both cases, one of us would have to find work while the other would bear the responsibility of success. We looked at best-case scenarios and worst-case catastrophes. On most things, the two offerings were about equal.

Neither of us wanted the other to miss out and we were each pushing the other not to turn down their option. We were not approaching our decision selfishly. After 20-years together, we know that supporting the other person is key to our success as a couple.

Bonjour encore, Montréal

In the end, we decided to stay in Montreal. It was the fact that I have more diverse career options that are not entirely dependent on my physical location that swung the decision.

Last Thursday, I declined the very generous agency offer in Toronto. I am an independent and career-driven woman, so turning this down was an extremely difficult thing for me to do – made even more so when they were so understanding and supportive of our predicament. I hope that one day I’ll have the opportunity to work with them and thank them for choosing me for such an incredible role. I wish them well in all their plans.

My husband has already started his new job and it is exceeding his expectations. It’s wonderful to see his future unfolding in such great ways.

Reboot

Now that I know I’m staying in Montreal, it’s time to take stock of my assets and reboot my direction. Some things that I know I love:

• marketing, strategy, social media, technology
• speaking, writing, educating
• startups
• digital legacy

Interestingly, over the past week during this U-turn period, I’ve had three media interview requests for digital legacy, have mentored startups in the current FounderFuel cohort, received two inquiries from companies wanting to explore opportunities to work together, and two speaking inquiries.

The adage about one door closing and another opening appears to be true for me right now, and I’m grateful and humbled by my good fortune.

In the coming weeks I’ll be defining my direction and coming up with a plan. If you have an opportunity you think might be of interest, I’d love to hear from you.

am@adelemcalear.com
514-277-5623
Twitter: @AdeleMcAlear
LinkedIn
Facebook

Thanks to all of my family, friends and colleagues who have been so supportive of me now, and in the past. Stay tuned.

Obvious sign

In the 5-months that I spent at Edelman Digital in Montreal, I learned a lot.

Measurement and Analytics are a must-have knowledge set. Just as in 1999 I pursued learning HTML because I thought it would be an essential skill for marketers and my career (and it has been), I believe that having measurement and analytics chops are mandatory to truly bring value to any company’s strategic decision-making. I will definitely continue to educate myself in this area, and encourage anyone who’s responsible for driving results to do so as well.

Corporations can be progressive. My return to the corporate world was long in coming, though in this case, brief. For being so large, Edelman is surprisingly agile in responding to the market and opportunities. This, I’m sure, accounts in large part for its incredible success. Some of the corporations I’ve worked for in my career sure could have learned a thing or two from Edelman’s approach.

Push yourself beyond your limits. When I left consulting to join Edelman Digital, I did so to go further in my career. I chose to narrow my focus to a small segment of my abilities in order to rise to other challenges, stretch and grow. It was a great way to learn new things about myself and to reaffirm some other things that perhaps I’d lost along the way.

Be grateful. I am truly grateful for my experience at Edelman. I am thankful for my successes, but more so for any missteps that I had while learning the ropes. Again, these were opportunities to learn so that I will grow and improve for the next time. I’m also grateful to have worked with so many amazing measurement and analytics pros, PR practitioners, web developers and senior management who impressed me with their dedication and talent.

What’s next for me? I’m looking for my next move. I want to use my talents in a more comprehensive way and integrate my experience – 5-years in social media with many more in marketing and communications.  I want to expand on my achievements in brand-building and strategic development, while continuing to stay at the front of the technology wave. I like trailblazers and organizations, big or small, seeking to make a difference. I want to do work that matters.

If you know of something that might fit the bill, please get in contact:

514.277.5623
Email
Twitter
LinkedIn

In the meantime, it looks like I’ll finally have time to get back to blogging

I am heading up the great team in Montréal that specializes in providing social insights and measurement and I will be liaising with other Edelman offices to provide clients with analysis and insights that will help guide their business decisions. I’m happy to be joining the company that is home to my colleagues in social media – David Armano, Steve Rubel, Dave Fleet, Rob Clark, Zena Weist, David Almacy – and so many more bright people that I’ll be getting to know in the coming months.

But What About…?

With this announcement, I will be retiring my consulting practice. I want to thank my clients and partners for making the last 4 years so fulfilling. Thank you for your confidence and for entrusting your marketing and social media to me. I’ve learned so much from you.

A special thank you goes to A.C. Riley and Mark Goren for your unwavering support and for always putting a smile on my face, no matter how tough a day I’ve had. I’m privileged to have worked with you both and to count you amongst my dearest friends.

Of course, I am grateful to my family who took the brunt of my crazy hours (remember when I was working on an Australian clock for 10 days while still juggling day-to-day, or the all-nighters on deadline? #goodtimes) and the waves of unpredictability that go along with striking out on one’s own. I could not have survived and thrived these last 4-years without your love and support, and I thank you for always being there for me.

Thanks also to my friends and all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way who sent me leads, had me speak at their event, and gave me a leg up when I needed it. I do my very best every day to pay your kindness forward.

This blog will continue, though with an expected change in focus and updated look (like I haven’t got enough on my plate ).

My research and speaking on Death and Digital Legacy will go on a bit of a break until I get my feet under me at my new gig. I’ll get back to it as time allows. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the topic, please be sure to follow my buddies Evan Carroll and John Romano over at The Digital Beyond.

I will also continue to stay as active as I can in the social media and tech scene here in Montréal and elsewhere, including being a mentor at startup incubator FounderFuel.

Why?

Some people might wonder why I’m giving up the freedom of my own business. My answer is simple. As my friend Shel Israel wrote a few months ago, it’s time. For me, the writing has been on the wall for the last year and my feelings about the future of social media consulting were confirmed in conversations with at least a dozen of my contemporaries at SXSW last March.

I need a new challenge and I am ready to dig into a niche. It’s exhausting work to be a generalist in social media because the pace of change makes it extremely difficult to stay on top of every aspect. In my new role at Edelman Digital, I’ll be happily diving into monitoring and measurement, while swimming in analytics and influence. I’ll be unfettered by the need to know the latest Twitter management app or Facebook custom page tool. Sure, I’ll be interested, but it won’t be essential for me to know. Narrowing my focus will help to alleviate the inevitable social media burnout.

And, the great thing about joining a company vs. being a lone consultant is that I get to work with a team of smart people who are just as passionate about this space as I am. It’s lonely out there on your own. I’m looking forward to doing my best work because of the collaborative process that teamwork brings.

So, here’s to new horizons and the next phase of my career!

• Shibi Mourad (Google): The Acceleration of Everything
• Connie Crosby (The Crosby Group): Adopting Social Media Inside the Enterprise
• Mark Goren (Transmission): Evaluating Social Media Monitoring Tools From A User’s Point of View
• Debbie Weil: Finding Your Social Media Sweet Spot
• Mitch Joel (Twist Image): CTRL-ALT-DEL – How to Reboot Your Marketing in a Connected World
• Geoff Livingston (Zoetica): Shooting the Social Media Messenger!
• Dragana Djermanovic (PRpepper): Social Web: in&out_come
• Maggie Fox (Social Media Group):Privacy is a Commodity, Not a Place
• Janna Anderson (Elon University/Pew Internet Project): Imagining the Internet

Ask Away

Can’t make it to Webcom Montreal? What would you like to take away from these sessions? Send me your questions, and I’ll do my best to report back the answers.

Running concurrently is WebCamp, an un-conference for developers to discuss the trends and issues evolving in web technology. (Sold out.)

There’s still time to register for Webcom tickets. The event is free to enter starting from 4 pm.

They were a great group who had lots of questions. Many of those in attendance had certainly experienced the let down that happens after you set up a Facebook page, get a few initial followers and then interest drops off when no strategy is in place to continue to engage fans of the page.

I also talked quite a bit about what to do when the shine starts to wear off the “Ooo! New Shiny!”. It’s hard for businesses of all sizes, but particularly small businesses with limited resources, to manage social media outreach when that is not your area of expertise. I commend all of the dentists and practice managers in my session today for understanding that they need to know more, and being open to hearing me bust some myths and shoot down the hype.

Here’s the slide deck to my session. It is applicable to most small and medium-sized businesses, not just dental practices. And, perhaps refreshingly, it stresses how to define your strategy based on your organization’s goals and objectives. Have a look and tell me what you  think.

Under CC licensse: Horial Varlan

I’ve taken some time off from blogging this winter to have a Big Think.

It’s been 4 years since I left my job and started my consultancy. A few years prior to leaving my employer, I’d immersed myself into the world of social media, learning everything that I could, convinced it would revolutionize the marketing profession. I remember pitching the VP of Sales on the value of producing a podcast. That was December 2004. The first Canadian podcasts only began in October of that same year. Needless to say, my timing was a little early and my pitch was not accepted.

In the spring of 2007, Twitter was only one year old and Facebook was not nearly as mainstream as it is now. There were few social media practitioners and agencies and we educated clients about the need to “join the conversation”,  a much-overused expression. Back then, we taught people how to use tools and why applying old-style marketing techniques to social media was the wrong approach.

Factions broke out. There were the Zealots – those who held themselves and everyone else to a moral high ground, insisting you couldn’t participate in social media unless you were utterly transparent and that every CEO should blog for their company – often a naïve and unrealistic blanket approach. And, there were and the Capitalists, who applied standard issue make-money-on-the-internet, secrets-of-success, increase-your-followers-for-$109 approaches.

Somewhere in between, I knew that I could help people understand and use social media to transform their businesses. I knew that I could use my  20-years of marketing experience and pair it with my knowledge of social media to make a difference and make a living.

As more agencies started popping up, and the large agencies started to train their people in social media and take the plunge themselves, larger clients didn’t need to use a specialty consultant like me. They could just stay with the agency they used for PR, for web, for advertising.

As social media has become mainstream, the number of people offering “social media strategy” has exploded. My specialty is now a commodity and I am lumped in with those who happen to know how to build a Facebook page.

Take this story for example:

Recently, at SXSW while waiting with a group of strangers, one person turned to another and asked, “What do you do?” The other replied, “I’m in IT consulting. We primarily did email consulting, but as that’s all moving to the cloud, we’re repositioning to offer social media marketing and strategy instead.”

It seems everyone thinks they can do it.

While at SXSW, I got to chatting with the old timers of Twitter; people I’ve known since 2007 and whom I met at SXSW in 2008 who are also social media practitioners. I must have heard something like this 6 times: the market is too crowded and if you didn’t become a super A-lister  early on or get swallowed up by a big agency, it’s time to either get out or become very narrowly focused to survive.

The industry has evolved. As we’ve been saying for 2 years, Twitter and Facebook are as common as the telephone and email. The shift moved us from teaching the tools to developing strategy, defending ROI, and conversation monitoring for business intelligence and lead generation. This sector is constantly refining and in flux, racing to keep pace with the frenetic pace of technology development.

Now, beginning my 5th year on my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the industry is going and wondering about my place in it. There are new things for me on the horizon, but it’s a little too early to talk about them right now.

But, just in case: Does anyone out there have a spare crystal ball they could lend me?

Canada boasts some of the highest internet penetration and social networking usage rates in the world. Social network users view social media as their online home—a hub for communication, entertainment and information.

The report also states that in some cases Canadians are adopting social media faster than in the US. It estimates that about 15.1 million internet users in Canada will have visited social networking sites at least monthly, up from 13.6 million in 2009.

The rankings of social networks by usage (via comScore) is not without some surprises, particularly Windows Live Profile as #2 and DeviantArt as #6.

More information about the report and additional stats can be found here.

This photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

My research on digital legacy issues over the last 18-months has led me to explore the area of content ownership, copyright, data portability and that dry, dusty thing that everything online has: Terms of Service.

When was the last time you read the TOS of Twitter, Gmail or Facebook (whose TOS has more words than the U.S. Constitution)?

Chances are very good that you’ve never read the legalese that is buried in the bowels of the least-frequented pages of a service. These backwaters are often filled with paragraphs in ALL CAPS, a contractual practice that predates the connotation of yelling online, yet still makes me think a lawyer is vigourously wagging a finger at me.

Let me save you some moments of your life that you’ll never get back. Here’s the gist of what most TOS contain:

You’ve just signed away the exclusive rights to your content.

You may still own the copyright. You may still own the intellectual property. But, that service where you just clicked “I Agree” upon sign up can likely do what they want with your stuff, without compensation, in perpetuity.

Will they actually use it?  Will they profit from it? Will they use it in a way that is not how you wish it to be represented?

Maybe not. But, you need to be aware that they now have the legal right to.

What does it mean for business and marketing?

Let’s talk photo sharing for a moment. Say you are a professional photographer and you use Flickr because you know you can set the level of copyright from All Rights Reserved to a very open and flexible Creative Commons license, depending on your needs and intent.

Did you know that by simply sharing a link to your photo on Twitter its content now falls under their TOS, regardless of the TOS of the service your photo resides? And that they can sub-license it?

Neither did I. Until I read this post.

This means you can no longer legally sell exclusive rights to anything you link to on Twitter.

Is Twitter Evil?

If they are, then so are thousands of other online services. I don’t believe that someone at Twitter is masterminding profiting from your linked content. It’s simply a case of services needing to cover their digital behinds. In comparison to analog printed works, where the process itself made content scarce, and therefore, containable, the flow of data is raging torrent that’s out of control.

Without this type of TOS, would Twitter be open to rights infringement simply by displaying the link to your content? What if your tweet, and its associated content on Twitpic or Flickr, were featured on CNN? Without the right to sub-license it, is it conceivable that you could sue Twitter? Possibly.

The letter of the law has not caught up with the sharing frenzy that is inherent to web 2.0. My feeling is that it will take nothing short of a revolution to change the status quo so that we control exclusive rights to our data.

Call me a cynic, but, more likely exclusivity is lost. Revolutions take passion and ignorance is bliss.