Jon Samsel

As I have stated in previous posts, for a company to be successful online and to grow its brand in a calculated and constructive way, executives and marketing managers must develop a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why branded content results are FOUND–whenever, wherever, and however social publishing is performed.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful!

Successful online branding, especially via social networks, may require a company to consider a range of possible tactical approaches, including:

• Social media publishing, syndication, outreach, monitoring, and measurement activities
• Embracing a multichannel marketing approach that includes both paid marketing (search, display, email, mobile, etc) and well as emerging marketing activities (social-search, SEO, blogging, etc)
• Partnering and experimenting with pilot programs in a way that frees up proprietary content & data, empowers employees & customers, plus supports open networking & really simple integration

Even if you actively participate in all of the above activities, you still need to be part of the social conversation. And the rub is–many of these online communities don’t want you there. That is, unless you have something of value to offer–and you can do this is an honest, straightforward, and transparent way.

If I were a brand manager ‘worried’ about social markets diluting my brand, I would hunker down in my boardroom with some of the best and brightest staff (along with an many agencies & consultant that I could muster together in a room) and figure out the best way to leverage this ‘loss of control’ and morph it into an opportunity to ‘influence & expand’ my brand reach. The way I look at it, if your product or service is solid and your efforts to become part of the community are sincere and of value to others, I can’t see why the social web wouldn’t benefit your customers, your staff, your investors, and your company.

Your brand is a living, breathing example of your value proposition in action. Your challenge is to determine how best to humanize your brand and become accepted as a trusted community partner–while encouraging the masses (your customers & your constituents) to be constructive advocates for the brands they are passionate about.

Most companies I know use a handful of different tools (free and paid) to measure, monitor, and influence their social media efforts. The reason being:

1. Companies looking to monitor the social web each have their own unique budgetary constraints
2. Most firms have varying levels of internal staff skill sets
3. No one social monitoring tool does it all

When I think of social monitoring and analysis tools, here is my wish list of top 7 features:

1. Analysis of the external social web + unique website characteristics
2. Multiple, real-time query & filtering abilities
3. Site, sentiment, and SEO analysis
4. Trending, charts/graphs, save & export functionality
5. Theming, grouping, or targeting around a topic/category
6. Competitive & influencer analysis
7. Ability to share, mix, or compare with external data feeds

That said, here is a short list of social tool providers:

http://www.converseon.com
http://www.ecairn.com
http://www.scoutlabs.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.techrigy.com
http://www.nielsen.com
http://www.trendrr.com
http://www.overtone.com
http://www.cymfony.com
http://www.heardable.com

I also recommend these tools that monitor site traffic, demographics, and SEO best practices:

http://www.websitegrader.com
http://www.compete.com
http://www.quantcast.com
http://www.conductor.com

Note: According to social media pro, Gunther Sonnenfeld, Ecairn was recently was recently rated by several top creative marketing agencies to be the most detailed and comprehensive social platform on the market.

“Ecairn’s phrase mining capabilities are superior and they have the best ‘market searching’ tools,” claims Gunther. “The simplest way to explain this is that platforms like Radian6 and Scout can keep track of brands, but they cannot easily deep mine conversations that may or may not be endemic to those brands. Ecairn’s engine thinks categorically, not just topically or according to brand sentiment.”

Do you know about a quality social web monitoring tool or service that I didn’t mention above? Drop me a line and let me know about them and I will add them to my list! Or, if you represent one of the companies above, pitch the benefits of your platform by responding to my post. I really would like everyone to have a chance to make their voice be heard.

I’d like to answer my own question by first making two cautionary statements: 1) Ghostwriters are hired hands, 2) A brand is a terrible thing to waste.

That said, I think a company runs a huge risk outsourcing their social media activities to an outside microblogging service unless that ‘ghost-brander’ has some skin in the game. As hired hands, a ghostwriter can make a mistake, be fired, and move on to her next gig while the brand must suffer through the blunder, repair the damage inflicted, and then control the negative impact of the snafu’s aftermath.

If you are a marketer at the helm of a large brand, I would urge you to think twice about the quality of the ghostblogger (is this an individual, a social media agency, etc.) and what type of training and recourse you may have in the event an unforeseen error occurs, or word gets out that your brand may not be as ‘authentic’ online as the corporate brand promise pontificates.

In the book, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” the authors state that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. They tell how most great brands possess a singularity of focus, a clarity of message. Playskool has done it with safety; Armani with class; Apple with “hipness.” The authors caution that the easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything. Diversification, they argue, can lead to a weakening of a brand’s quality, a drop in top-of-mind awareness, and more.

The gold rush of brands to quickly embrace social media–either to begin listening, to engage and solve, or to get heard–can lead to some pretty poor decisions that could cost your brand dearly in the long run.

Many firms are experimenting with social media by looking at it as an extension of their internal marketing department’s duties. Some have already found great success by promoting social advocacy as an extension of an employee’s job function–training and empowering certain staff to become the living, breathing, extension of their brand’s value proposition (the face of the brand). Ford’s social media advocate, Scott Monty, comes to mind. Another is Tom Dickson the CEO of Blendtec–who can ignore his “Will It Blend” series on YouTube? Then there is Frank Eliason, the man behind @comcastcares on Twitter. Consumers seem to value the sincerity of the brand voice and in most instances, press accolades confirm what everyone feels–this activity makes sense and is good for both the consumer and the brand.

Alternative social media outreach initiatives that many companies opt for instead resemble classic outsourcing models which utilize external creative agencies, social microblogging, and even ongoing monitoring services to represent brands on sites like Twitter, Posterous, Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, and the like. With the ‘right’ brand partner, extensive training, a tight service level agreement, and close oversight and direction by internal marketing staff, brands can have success embracing ‘ghostbranding.’

The rub comes when a consumer asks questions such as: “With whom am I speaking to? Are you a company employee or a hired hand?” How this questions is answered is critical. An honest answer clarifying that no, this is not an actual brand employee may turn off a portion of your followers and perhaps generate some bad press. A dishonest answer could cause much greater harm if the truth ever gets out, which will surely have a negative impact on your followers and your brand image–likely resulting in a press feeding frenzy to shame your brand into an apology.

I don’t believe most consumers care whether they are having conversations with a ghostwriter or a company employee as long as the dialog with the brand is honest, timely, helpful, useful, consistent, straightforward, and as transparent as possible.

I don’t advise brands to utilize ghostwriters for social services such as Twitter, especially if you are a popular, well-established brand with the wherewithal to develop an internal social media outreach strategy involving real, authentic employees. If, on the other hand, you have tried to launch an internal social outreach program to no avail, or if you are a small, emerging brand with less to risk, partnering with a capable third-party to properly represent your brand on social networks is entirely feasible.

Suffice it to say that the risk of not participating in the social web at all far outweighs the risk that something may go wrong in your attempts to engage in meaningful social conversations.

So you have a wonderful idea for a new interactive game. How do you transform that raw idea into a fully finished product? Writers, designers, programmers, content experts, and project managers usually start by creating a written document that describes the project in detail–as a way to sell the concept to investors, producers, and distributors.

This document can take the form of a proposal, an elaborate treatment, a complete design document, or even a screenplay. Design proposals, in particular, allow each member of the financial, development, creative, and marketing teams to review the idea, its characters, its settings, its game play and its potential marketability prior to investing hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years to produce. A written document may also serve to demonstrate your ability to produce a concept.

Here are the basic elements that make up an interactive design proposal:

1. Story summary
2. Character descriptions
3. Interactive design structure
4. Viewing matrix
5. Sample screenplay pages
6. Technical specifications
7. Creative team bios
8. Production timetable
9. Marketing plan
10. Budget and/or Profitability forecast

Here is a sample story summary for “Subterfuge,” an interactive sci-fi series created by author, Darryl Wimberley.

SUBTERFUGE

The Premise

It is the year 2139, an age of transitional technologies, of rapid advances in cyberspace and near space, in biogenics and nanotechnology. But technology never brings Utopia in its wake and human nature remains the same. The streets of New Las Vegas are as familiar to us as The Strip of today. And JAKE STRYKER, our lead protagonist, is familiar too.

The interactive series will weave Jake’s active story from his alcoholic beginnings in orbit above a suffocating Earth to his salvation beside Saturn’s rings. The Solar System is Stryker’s beat. But even that place, large as it is, is no larger than the human heart.

The Period and Place

The interactive episodic series takes place in the year 2139. The action ranges from a man-made station near Jupiter to the series’ primary location in the red-light district of New Las Vegas. There are no gimmicks here. Jake can’t warp-drive to distant galaxies. He can’t beam himself out of jeopardy. There are no force fields in Jake’s world which can deflect a handy shotgun. It’s not that people have given up on these ideas, of course. In fact, the opening script features a power-hungry man in a global corporation who puts big bucks on the line to make a futuristic technology possible.

But Jake isn’t much impressed. Stryker feels a strong sense of nostalgia for the old vices—Cigarettes. Hamburgers and fries. Whiskey straight from a bottle. And, no thank you, an hour of cybersex just isn’t the same as the real thing.

Story Summary

The opening episode for this interactive series introduces JAKE STRYKER, a one-time rocket jock no become an alcoholic with a dead end job loading cargo and contraband on a space station falling apart at the seams. The brutal murder of Jake’s lover and one-time partner, SANDY AIMES, brings Jake quite literally down to Earth. Sandy’s reputation is sullied in death, her murder being claimed by authorities to have resulted from Sandy’s involvement in a criminal consortium stealing nuclear-fusion technology from TERRA-SOL, Inc., based in New Las Vegas.

Jake doesn’t believe for a moment that his one-time love would steal a dime from anyone. He cannot abide the notion that Sandy’s killers are of no concern to the Cops on Earth sooo….Jake quits his job, grabs his last hundred credits, his antediluvian .45 automatic handgun and drops to Earth. Reaching New Las Vegas, Jake teams up with an illegal android, ROLO DEX, and a shady casino owner, BELISE SHAFFRON, to redeem sandy’s good name. In the process, he unearths a major corporate scandal and a host of bad guys on a home planet which, in the 22nd Century, is reaching a social and ecological crisis. Jake does find Sandy’s killer and in the course of saving her reputation finds redemption himself.

To read part one of this article, click here.

As I stated in my previous post, every article writer can use a helping hand now and then to come up with ideas for an article. An external stimulus, for example, can often jump start the creative process.

Here are another twenty tips to ponder when you’re searching for new article ideas:

21. The characteristics of a geographic area. This is similar to that of creating an article based on a place, but with a larger area in mind. Examples: “The Charm of Living in Aspen,” “Basking the Beaches of Ibiza,” “Cape Hatteras: Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Consider or study various geographic areas. When you travel in a new geographic area, be thinking of possible articles at all times; they are all around you.

22. A key historical figure from the past. Examples are “The Staggering Achievements of Benjamin Franklin,” “Billionaire Businessman Howard Hughes,” and “Dreaming in Color: Josephine Baker.”

23. Various statements of command. You see these commands daily on billboards, in magazines, greeting cards, newspapers, and many other places. The ‘‘you’’ (meaning whoever reads the command) is implied in each one. Examples of command statements: “Hang in there,” “Brace for unrest,” “Keep your chin up,” “Make someone happy,” and “Go out and make it a great day.”

24. A saying or proverb. Here is an example: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” or “Put your best foot forward.”

25. An angle on how to do something. Example: “Professional Sales Presentations with PowerPoint,” “Eliminate Foggy Bathroom Mirrors Using Shaving Cream,” “Increase Your IQ Through Music.”

26. A title. You can easily prove this to yourself by glancing over titles of various published articles. Some may suggest variations for new articles. In other words, the title of an article can lead a writer to see other possible titles and thus eventual articles. Example: “How Washington Wastes Your Tax Money.” This title might lead to articles on how people waste time or how the natural resources of a nation are wasted.

27. A basic truth. Here is an example: There is an old, popular saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Events that occur in real life are often stranger, more curious, and more incredible than the stuff of fiction. Example” “Man Shot For Making Noise During Movie.”

28. A specific personality or celebrity in mind (alive or deceased). Examples: “Brad Pitt: Myth in the Making,” “Elvis Presley Predicted He Would Die Young,” “Heather Graham Boogies Her Way to Stardom.”

29. A cliché or overused expression. Clichés should be avoided within the article itself, but may hold the seed of a possible thought or phrase that could lead to a new article. Example clichés: “When the cows come home,” “You eat like a pig,” “Happy camper,” and ”Cheer up, it’s not the end of the world.”

30. The signs of the zodiac. Each sign may yield several possible articles. Examples: “10 Ways to Catch a Leo Soulmate,” “My Sister, the Libra.”

31. Patriotism (an individual’s, a group’s, or a nation’s). Thinking about patriotism in general can lead to a variety of articles. Example: “The Sleeping Soldier at Arlington.”

32. The tool of curiosity. Everyone is curious about something. You have only to decide what you think might wet the appetite of your readers. Be guided by what you find curious. Examples: “What Will Colonies On Mars Be Like?” and “Why Dogs Chase Their Tails.”

33. Some aspect of change and its effects. One way to get started is to list the changes ahead in the next century, then think about the effects of those changes, and what people can do to be ready for them. Examples: “Social Media Divas Starts Twitter Cat Fight,” “The Vanishing Garage Inventor,” “Realdolls: Wives of Tomorrow?”

34. A special promise or appeal to the reader. Simply ask yourself what kind of article readers would find appealing. What articles hold promise of being an extra-good read? Examples: “The Road To Success In Affiliate Marketing,” “Swimming Pool Landscaping: Secrets To Success,” “Nine Green Gift Ideas for Christmas,” and “A Slimmer You in Thirty Days.”

35. A key contemporary person (someone in the news daily). Suri Cruise. Sarah Palin. Daniel Craig. Barak Obama. Victoria Beckham. Plenty of examples can be found on TheDrudgeReport.com, TMZ.com, or Politico.com.

36. A dream or a nightmare. Keep a journal next to your bed and keep a record or your nighttime visions. A few of them might spark article ideas. Examples: “Monsters in the Closet and Other Childhood Fears,” “The Strangest Sleep Disorders,” and “The Boogeyman is Real and He Lives on the Web.”

37. One of the major professions. Articles about doctors, lawyers, teachers and clergymen can be quite effective. Example: “Do Doctors Have the Right to Play God?”

38. Common, everyday things. Examples: “Eight Proven Ways to Save Money,” or “Relieve a Sore Throat in Five Minutes or Less.”

39. Historical, economic, political, cultural, or military influences affecting a nation. Examples: “The Ultimate Defense: The Case for a National Missile Defense System,” or “Will a Fierce Battle Over Gay Rights Split the Anglican Church?”

40. The answer to a question. An example is “Why Clocks Tick Clockwise,” or “The Coldest City in America May Surprise You.”

You may want to read over this list of suggestions for jumpstarting ideas for articles from time to time. As a writing exercise, select one of the suggested 40 topics and write a practice article. The process of writing will surely trigger other new ideas for articles.

To read part one of this article, click here.

Unless you’ve had your head buried in a hole for the past few months you have probably stumbled upon a blog post or two touting Google’s interest in purchasing Twitter as a way to leapfrog forward (and dominate) the real-time search market. Whether or not Google is actually interested in acquiring Twitter is not as important as what is says about the prospect of social search as the next big thing. Move over SEO, SEM and social media. Social search (as its own channel) has arrived!

Social search is an emerging new marketing channel. It’s not paid search, nor organic search, and it’s not social media either. It may be a close cousin to each but it’s a channel in its own right–and it is growing at a fantastic clip.

Trust is the Linchpin

As many of you have already heard in popular search marketing presentations, Google currently functions as every company’s home page. Seventy-two percent of all U.S. searches are done using Google, and people tend to type in branded URL’s even though they could just type it into the address bar to get to the site directly.

Most people trust Google but if you asked these same users if they trust Google’s results, you might elicit a difference response.  For many, trusting Google’s results depends on what they’re searching for compared to what’s presented on the results page.

A recent search for the branded term, Allstate Insurance, for example, yielded 3,210,00 results. Something tells me the majority of these results are bogus, spam, or at least, somewhat insignificant on the relevance scale. So does a Google user trust only the results that appear on page one or should all 3 million+ results be trusted as well?

Compare Google with your own person social network. Most people trust their social network. And this trust seems to be manifesting into actions.

Take a look at these recent statistics that showcase social media’s impact on the retail purchase decision and consumption process:

“60% of consumers are actively involved in generating and sharing buzz.”
- Forrester Research

“80% of consumers say recommendations are the best sources of information.”
- Universal McCann

“Over 90% of consumers say WOM influenced their purchases”
- DoubleClick

Social Search Is Not Paid Search *

• Community is at the heart of the web experience, hence the rise of social media
• Hundreds of these communities are emerging
• And there are thousands of services that help connect these communities and share data amongst these communities
• Brands haven’t been invited into these communities, it’s about individuals
• Brands are trying to figure out how to become part of these communities because they know that effective listening is critical to business success
• Social media advertising is an oxymoron. You can’t buy your way into this club
• Social is not about advertising at all

Social Search Is Not Natural Search

• The big search engines are already playing a role in social search
• Most engines are morphing their algorithms and business models to account social content (Microsoft’s Bing comes to mind)
• Some social networks, like Twitter, have built in search (and user love it)
• New vertical search engines and social listening services are emerging to help people tap into this mountain of real-time, word-of-mouth content that can appear in many formats
• But is social search similar to natural search optimization?
• It’s not about tweaking a web site’s content & code
• It’s not about adding localized content pages to a website
• It’s not link building
• Social is not really about optimization at all

Social Search Is Not Social Media

• Social media is more about testing, influencing and monitoring
• It’s about user-centric conversations
• For companies, activities inlcude actively monitoring brand, reputation, and threats
• It’s also about tracking sentiment and buzz volume over time
• And its also about customer service outreach
• For some companies it’s about sales & promotions too
• But social media is not social search

The Social Web (of Opportunity) Is Huge

From a size & scope standpoint, the social web is already huge (and it’s growing!). It’s made up of content that lives as DATA, which does not necessarily reside on a single, traditional website. Consumers are publishing unprecedented quantities of data across all types of networks, sites, services, and feeds.

And the scary part is that the social web is already impacting opinions, brand perceptions, purchase decisions, along with the public psyche.

Social search can be thought of as the mechanisms used to tap into this emerging mass of trusted knowledge. These mechanisms are a combination of popular search technologies we already know and use today (Google, Bing, etc), new platforms (Hunch, Collecta, Cha Cha, etc.) and intra-search tools that help users navigate the popular social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc).

New types of search engines are entering the fray, allowing users to:

• Conduct real-time searches
• Review conversations, reviews, comments, ratings & tags
• Helps find multimedia content, RSS feeds, blogs, and other web 2.0 content

The big takeaway around social search is the enormous opportunity–and challenge–it presents to companies around the globe. To be successful in social search, businesses must formulate a proactive strategy that directly influences and impacts who, what, where and why certain results are FOUND whenever, wherever, and however a social search is performed.

That’s no easy task. The good news is that nobody has mastered it yet and it will be years before the rules of engagement and optimization best practices are etched into stone.

* Several of the bullet points in the ‘Social Search Is Not Paid Search’ section of this post can be attributed to Rob Key, a panelist at SES NY, March 2008.

Ken Moss is a very smart guy. He led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years. So why did he, of all people, launch a Twitter search engine known as CrowdEye? Yes, there is a huge demand for identifying, cataloging, monitoring, and just plain making sense of the deep web of conversations and content accessible today online. But a social search engine? Looks like Ken recognized that the social web has reached a tipping point–it’s huge, it’s still growing, and it’s impacting the way people acquire knowledge and make decisions. Social search needs tools to help people find what others are saying.

So what is Social Search anyway? Social search is all about uncovering nuggets of information from real people (like me and you) in multiple formats such as text, video, blog posts, reviews, comments, tags, tweets, pictures, audio, bookmarks, and events. These word-of-mouth exchanges are the new content that is now dominating the web. Try it yourself. Google a major brand and count how many results are company-generated versus consumer generated. One out of eight results, on average, across engines, can usually be attributed to someone other than the firm who controls the brand. This is simply amazing.

Social content tends to be deemed more authentic than prepackaged corporate propaganda–and, thanks to a plethora of easy-to-use web tools and conversation hubs such as Twitter, social participation is booming. The social web is having a MEASURABLE impact on how search works and how consumer behave.

Social content is having so much impact that it’s spawning the next generation of search tools.

Take WhosTalkin? for example. It’s a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations around topics of interest.

Pipl is a people search engine. AT it’s core, social is about personal conversations–so it makes sense for a social engine to search through public records, social sites, and the web to uncover information about individuals.

Collecta is a real-time search engine. Instead of searching ‘old stuff’ like standard web sites, they monitor the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so they can show you results as they happen.

Then there is Socialmention, a site that allows visitors to search terms around specific categories of the social web such as blogs, comments, etc.

Caterina Fake recently launched Hunch, a tool for finding answers to a wide variety of questions. What makes this tool unique is that it makes decisions based on a database of responses provided by real people–and the results get better the more people use it.

OneRiot is a service that uses a person’s own social network and takes into consideration what’s currently popular within someone’s network when providing search results.

ChaCha has answered 150 million text inquiries/conversational Q&A’s over the past 18 months. ChaCha uses expert guides (in-house staff trained to use their proprietary search tools) to provide answers to any question–mostly via cellular phones.

These new social search engines approach ‘finding results’ in a way that standard search engines don’t offer. From a marketing standpoint, these new generation of social search tools are helpful, but ’social’ is not yet a fully baked channel that can be targeted and optimized. Social is evolving. There are some standards and many variations–making indexing results a real challenge.

Social search is an emerging topic. Many of the tools to find, sort and serve up results are primitive–and the various types of social conversations they do find are not easily placed into context. However, social search is hat our doorstep and it’s evolving very quickly.

So why should social search be at the forefront of of every company’s online marketing strategy?

1. Paid search can only grow and be optimized so far. At some point you reach the point of poor returns (long tail search terms are one example) and paid search cannot be expanded in a way that makes profitable business sense.
2. Natural search tends to be inward-focused, concentrating 80% of its effort and output around website optimization. Companies tend to take a web development approach to SEO by identifying a small cluster of valuable keywords and then optimize the content and code around them. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but SEO can be so much more. Search engine optimization is about producing relevant, engaging content in multiple formats. It’s about empowering employees and customers to participate in content publishing and syndication. SEO is about about link building. It’s about harnessing feedback. But when SEO is controlled and bottlenecked by an overzealous technology department, marketers are often left with few ways to innovate, expand, and improve organic search results.
3. Social search, on the other hand, is about tapping into the deep web of conversational data exchanges to uncover jewels of knowledge in which to monitor, influence, or act upon. This hidden web presents an enormous challenge and opportunity to marketers because it’s an emerging channel, research are scattered and not easily aggregated and accessible, metrics are emerging and evolving (they are different than traditional search), and how best to join in the social dialog is a hot topic for debate within some companies due to the legal and regulatory risks some belief social media poses.

Like it or not…ready or not…social search is already here. Yes, the onus is on smart marketers to monitor and make sense of it all. But analytical search tools are arriving every day to help makes things easier.

Companies have a choice–they can dive in now and start monitoring their brand reputation, conducting competitive research, identifying opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends, resolving problems, and even selling by providing unique offers and incentives. Or they can choose to bury their head in the sand and wait for social search to ripen as channel…sitting still as their brands are talked about, hijacked, or even transformed by consumers who are hungry for authentic opinions, insights, news or feedback.

The social web is happening with or without listening to the marketer’s side of the story. The business stage is now set. It’s your move.

Whenever you are stumped as to how to start an article, you need not dispair. All you have to do is think of this magic phrase—the five W’s. Immediately your mind will be set into motion, asking who, what, when, where and why.

Nobody has ever counted them, but thousands upon thousands of articles have been started and completed via the help and use of the five W’s. Bloggers and journalists live by them. Newspaper stories and blog posts, Tweets and emails must get to the point fast, report the key facts or newsworthy angle, and entertain, educate and/or inform.

The five W’s are basic, but effective, rules of writing engagement. Let’s take a look at each one.

WHO?

Leave the who of your article out, and your article is dead in the water. Readers want to know who it’s about, or who did what, or who said what. A great many articles obviously hit the who question fast.

Take the published article, “Money Making Entrepreneurs,” for example. No doubt at all is left in the reader’s mind as to the who of the article. It is clearly meant for entrepreneurs:

“Are you willing to take risks? If so, then you have the major characteristics of an entrepreneur, and possibly a money—making one.”

The opening of the article continues to define and explain what it is to be an entrepreneur, making it even more clear that anyone who has ever thought of launching his or her own business will find the article stimulating and helpful:

“By its very nature, entrepreneurship means being willing to think, originate, and then execute your objectives and conclusions. Risk is involved throughout the process.”

In another published article, I tried to make it very clear in the opening paragraphs that the who of the article was the founder of Coca Cola. Actually, there were three founder-leaders that made up the WHO in this case:

“Countless millions the world over would never think of letting a day go by without a nice cold bottle, can or fountain drink of Coca-Cola. Three founder-leaders were behind the launching, early growth, and development of the legendary soft drink: Dr. John S. Pemberton, Asa G. Chander, and Robert W. Woodruff.”

WHAT?

Remember the old film, with Michael Caine in the lead, titled “What’s It All About, Alfie?” That same question is in the readers’s mind; they want to know what your subject and article are all about. Don’t make them wait several pages or half-way through the article before it’s clear what it’s about. Tell them fast in the early paragraphs.

In the published article, “Coping with Customer Skepticism,” notice how the very first sentence spotlights the “what’s it all about” question, making the subject clear to the reader:

“A problem that most sales professionals face continually with certain prospects, customers, and clients is that of skepticism. This problem is in effect a thief because it can rob your chances for many sales. By knowing how to handle it, you are certain to sell more in the years ahead.”

Here is another example, from the published article titled “How Do You Face Crucial Moments?” Again, the very first sentence reveals the WHAT instantly, and then the second paragraph poses a question and proceeds to analyze the what more:

“What do you do when the unexpected strikes? Do you blow with the wind or stand firm?

Ever watch a racing car come off the track in apparent sudden trouble? Up till then, the driver may have had the race in the bag.”

In the third and next paragraph, an effective analogy is made:

“Isn’t life a lot like a race track? As babies we’re cared for much like a new racing car. We take to the track in our teens, and really begin to hit the laps on the “young adult stretch.” Then, as mature adults, we become “freeway flyers.” From the start, we never know when we’ll have to face a crucial moment, or how we will react to it.”

WHEN?

When something happened, took place, or somebody did or said something are all important. It’s part of the team members that build the article. Again, a film is a good example here. Remember Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve in the classic love story, “Somewhere in Time?” The viewer or film-goer needed to know when, how far back in time, Richard Collier (Reeve) was trying to get to, which was made clear, soon in the story, to be 1912. By the same token, article readers want to know when an event took place, when someone’s life changed, when the family moved, when so-and-so hit the lottery. Let them in on the when question, and you will keep them reading.

Here is a WHEN example from a published article titled “Reward Yourself Now and Then.” Notice how clear the when is in the opening paragraph:

“A few months ago, an elderly millionaire killed himself by weighting his body then shooting himself.. .just before jumping into the cold waters of Long Island Sound. He jumped from his own $200,000 three-bedroom yacht.”

Even illustrations and examples from the middle of an article should make the when clear for the reader. Look at the following example from a published article on the life and times of Walt Disney:

“From the day he arrived in Hollywood in the early 1920s, Disney’s career covered a 43 year period. Disney could not have picked a better time to make his move. During these golden years, the motion picture grew into an established and widely popular American art form. Walt Disney did much to help it attain this growth.”

WHERE?

This one is like a close friend to WHEN. Readers also need to know where the monument stands, where a war ended, where an accident took lives, where the number one vacation spot (currently) is, and answers to other WHERE questions. Remember the novel and film titled “The Bridges of Madison County?” When you think about it, that title is the WHERE being answered. The entire novel is centered in the WHERE question.

Here is a WHERE example from the published article titled “57 Ways to Sell a Pickle:”

“Success was no quick arrival in the life of Henry John Heinz. He started a vegetable garden in the 1860s outside his family’s home, in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, and showed a talent and sense of soil and seed, which led to a surplus.”

Notice how the second sentence of the opening paragraph states exactly where the subject of the article launched his career and revealed his talent.

WHY?

Last but not least is the Why. Why did the teenager leave town? Why has the weather gone berserk in recent months and years? Why are Labrador Retrievers so much sweeter and friendlier dogs than others? There are hundreds of why questions waiting to be answered. Your reader wants to know the why answers that relate to your article subjects.

In the published article, “Counseling the Bereaved,” directed at ministers and clergy, you can see how clear the when is communicated:

“When those in your congregation lose a loved one, and are devastated by grief, the way you can help them most is simply to get to their side as soon as possible. Just your presence, your being there, will help them more than any words of comfort you may wish to offer.”

If you’re an Average Joe like me, you probably search for your own name using a search engine once and a while to see what pops up in the search results. Call it curiosity or vanity, I would classify it as ’smart sleuthing’ to see how the engines display ‘who you are’ to the world.

The more common your name, however, the more likely YOU may not even appear on page one results. The more unique YOUR name is, or the more active YOU are online, there is an increased chance your name will be served up in the organic results for web, image, news, video, audio, or blog search queries.

There is good news from Google. They have created a new tool to help people JUST LIKE YOU exert greater control over their PERSONAL BRANDS.

Just type ‘me’ into the Google search bar and the first paid result will be a message to ‘create your own profile on Google.’ Having a current Google profile about YOU could help make it easier for people to find YOU versus someone with the same name that isn’t YOU.

Google Profiles is just one small piece of the larger brand-management puzzle, albeit a useful one, and I encourage you to try it.

Google software engineer Brian Stoler recently wrote in a posting at the Internet firm’s website that when searching for yourself on Google to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren’t always what you want people to see.

For example if you type in the name “Nick Lange” you’ll generate some Google search results that are quite disparate.

• Are you the Nick Lange who, according to one forum poster, “BEWARE OF SCAMMER: Nick Lange, aka Nick20, UWisconsin77…DO NOT do business with Nick Lange from Florida!******”
• Or are you the Nick Lange from the 1991 graduating class of Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, CA?
• Or perhaps you are Nick Lange, illusionist, at www.nicklange.com
• And then there is author Nick Lange who posted a very opinionated research paper for the University of Illinois titled, “Interracial Relationships and Korean American Families”

If your name (aka personal brand) was Nick Lange, would you be concerned about what was already out there live on the web? The brand of Nick Lange is not unique. In fact, there are several real (or seemingly real) people all using the same name (brand). In the Internet, real people sharing the same brand can cause headaches for you if they are not managing their brand the way you would like them to. To the unsuspecting searcher, how are they to know one Nick Lange from another?

Besides the real Nick Langes co-opting your brand, anybody could pretend to be you and easily inflict brand havoc if they wanted to. And this scenario doesn’t necessarily cover the identity thieves who are actively trying to steal your persona for financial gain. These evil-doers can also inflict much pain on your brand if you do not catch the intrusions early, and rectify them.

So now that you’ve seen how a simple vanity search can provide valuable insights into how well you’re managing your personal brand and the dangers that may already exist, what are some good pointers for improving or protecting your egosurf results and the BRAND OF YOU? Here are five:

1. Establish your online brand baseline. The brand of you starts with a simple search on Yahoo, Google and MSN. Taking a snapshot of your search results is a great first step in managing your reputation
2. Publish your personal brand. Launch a blog, a resume website, or a personal website all about you could help boost the quality of your unique vanity search results. Better yet, ensure that there are unique image labeled as you, word docs, PDF’s and .ppt files branded you and live on the web, or go so far as to create and publish podcasts, videos, press releases, and the like — as you, about you or authored by you. Search engines don’t just serve up web page results, they serve up results in multiple media formats
3. Take action against online brand fraud or mistakes. If you find that your personal brand has been misused, take action against the site that has posted it. For example, if an unflattering photo of you has been posted on Flickr.com by an old high school buddy, ask that is be taken down or moved to a web service that is login protected so as not to cause you embarrassment
4. Stake your claim on social media sites. Utilize social networks to clone your online persona to be present everywhere. I nice service is KwonEm.com, which can check the availability of your brand across 120 of the most popular social networks. For a small fee they will register your brand on all available social sites on your behalf
5. Be diligent. Check and re-check your egosurf results often to see what others may see when they search for your name or brand. If you are surprised by what you find, imagine what others are thinking! Stay on the offense and you will be much farther ahead of the next guy or gal in managing the valuable brand of you