Don’t Shoot the Messenger

In my last post, I talked about how we are now all our own image consultants. This time, I want to talk about what that might mean for the future.

For career-survival, it’s fast becoming a requirement that you be online and actively managing your “brand.” It stands to reason that overall, the biggest economic benefits will accrue to those who best manage their online brands. Employers are already looking for people with social media expertise. They’re already checking people’s online credentials: their blogs, their tweets, their Facebook accounts, and what comes up in search. People who have made an online reputation for themselves as experts are going to rise to the top of the list for employers in their field.

Businesses are moving online in vast numbers, as well. They are seeking ways to differentiate themselves in the increasingly crowded market. They need to connect through and offer value in communities and social networks in order to attract potential customers and retain an ongoing connection with the ones they have. So…

Prediction number 1: We’ll see more services and tools aimed at making it easier to manage your personal or corporate brand.

Okay, that’s not such a stretch. There are already plenty of personal branding consultants. And what are the Social Media Experts but consultants who make it easier for a company to manage its brand and promote itself.

But in addition to consultants and agencies, I expect we’ll see tools, applications, web sites and services aimed at making it easier for business and individuals to manage their images themselves. Tools that will:

• Make it easier to maintain profiles across multiple sites.
• Since it’s important to show your expertise, either as an individual or as a business, we’ll see more tools that help to provide information that can be leveraged to show expertise.
• Services that surface niche information and enable you to leverage it for social media purposes.
• Tools that help people and businesses to identify information trends early in order to capitalize on them by blogging, tweeting, or otherwise promoting and commenting on them, thereby demonstrating “insight.”

Yes, the FTC recently announced guidelines that require clear disclosure when a blogger endorses products and receives some kind of compensation. But advertisers and marketers are looking at less obvious business relationships that aren’t covered by these new FTC guidelines. A blog about parenting might not specifically promote Pampers, for instance, but it might include a humorous post about how little Jimmy’s Huggies leaked in an embarrassing way while the kids were trick-or-treating–and I’m sticking with Pampers, thank you.

We’ve heard about ghost bloggers on business blogs. I predict we’ll see similar issues arise on personal blogs. For example, for people who don’t regularly have those flashes of insight or don’t have the time to create original blog content (or to whom writing doesn’t come naturally), writers-for-hire will appear who are willing to ghost-write content for your personal blog, so that you can advance your online reputation and, therefore, your career. Or, a black-market in good personal-branding content will arise, similar to the sites that provide essays for students.

Which leads me to prediction number 2…

Prediction number 2: We’ll see services and tools aimed at vetting and rating individuals and sites. They will be rated based on “authenticity,” value, and thought-leadership.

Let’s start with the business-side. As marketing becomes more subtly integrated with content, some consumers will want to identify content creators who have paid relationships with businesses versus those who are truly independent. They’ll want ways to evaluate bias and business influence on sites. Some people won’t care. Other consumers will want to know if a video was created just for fun or if the creator was paid to make it.

Even more interesting is the personal side. As prediction number 1 becomes more and more true, employers will want tools to help them root out fakes or people who are building their reputation less on original work and more through these various tools. They’ll want to find duplicate but reworded content, find the original sources for ideas to distinguish the true “thought leaders” from copy-cats, and so on.

Of course they’ll want tools to find the absolute fakes, who are using ghost bloggers, etc. But they’ll also want tools that allow them to rate people based on their social content.

For example, I came up with the idea for and implemented TweetPackage.com to allow people to easily follow a group of Tweeps. It’s obviously a good idea, because Twitter is adding similar functionality to their UI (called Lists). And within a month of our releasing TweetPackage, someone else came out with TweepML, which offers similar functionality.

What that means is that mass-following was an idea whose time had come. If a certain number of insightful people saw that and built solutions, then an even larger number saw the need, but didn’t build solutions. Yes, TweetPackage might indicate some thought-leadership, but it wasn’t something that nobody else had thought of. On the thought-leadership scale, I might get a five. Seeing something that nobody else has foreseen at all yet would rate a ten.

As tools come along, they’ll rate people based on the totality of their content over time, evaluating their comments, blog entries, tweets, etc. for uniqueness, quality, accuracy, foresight, and so on.

This probably sounds awful. Especially to those who participated in the early advent of social networks. If you love the beauty of community, enjoy the camaraderie, and value the free-flow of ideas, then the thought of increasing numbers of fakes or people using tools to make it less time-consuming to socialize probably sounds pretty disturbing. The idea of being rated based on your content and discussions probably sounds even worse.

Well, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not saying I like the future I foresee. I’m just saying…