The Brand Called “Me”.
4October 4, 2012 by alexandragreid
I enjoyed the class readings this week about creating a strong online presence, or brand. Turns out, my professional online presence doesn’t hold much “Klout”, with a measly score of 18. I hope to improve upon that in the upcoming weeks as I more fully delve into the ever burgeoning world of social media and how I can use it professionally and not just for fun.
I plan to create a Klout account for my personal online profiles just out of curiosity for my score; I have a decent number of blog followers on my personal blog so I suppose we’ll see! I wasn’t surprised to see former colleagues of mine in my “Klout Network” when being asked who my influences were; an old friend of mine from undergrad has got a score of 50. Well, then again, it is Avi…
As I don’t think that I’ll be using this blog past the duration of this course, I’m pretty happy with the look at feel of it as it stands. My about.me page, however, definitely needed some tweaking. I started out with this:
Version 1.0 of my about.me page basically consisted of a clip of information from my resume, my standard bio photo, and a background picture of a scene that I took at White Clay Creek State Park.
And now….Version 1.1:
Completely redesigned and more better! Content has been updated for a more personal feel, and I really tried to “sell myself” in a digital snapshot. I like this version a whole lot better, as I think it is a more accessible page than the prior one (and I think I’ll get a little more traffic as a result.)
See the full page as http://about.me/areid.
Alexandra Reid 
I thought the Klout reading were rather interesting as well. I found the comments to be particularly interesting as well! What’s funny is taht when I was first reading about the Klout score, I found myself getting somewhat envious of people with a high score. I suppose it sparked something competitive in me or something. I couldn’t wait to start tweeting away to try to get my score up from 11 🙂 Then, after reading the comments, I had a completely different feeling about the score. How do I know that there wouldn’t be some unintended consequence from a high score. Will people (employers) think I sit around all day tweeting and posting on Facebook when I should be working? The article states something along the lines of “hiring decisions are being made based on a candidate’s Klout score” – implying that people with higher scores get hired, but couldn’t that go the other other way?
BTW: Your new about.me page looks great!!
And another concern of mine with the Klout score has to do with the validity of the score its self. How is that score calculated? I’m sure, if I worked with it enough to understand what actions produce big upticks in the score, I could “game-the-system”. One might say that that could be done with any scoring system – for instance, one’s FICO score. But, unlike the FICO scoring system, which is very slow moving and requires a long history of positive actions to cause the score to rise, the Klout system can be affected very quickly and requires no history.
In the trading industry, fast-moving indicators are generally very risky and less reliable than their slower moving counterparts.
Great points, Bill. Isn’t great that we’ll talk about “metrics” by the end of the semester? 😉
Alex,
I like the way that you have “recreated” yourself on your aboutme page. It looks great! I do agree with William when he states that one could manipulate their Klout score thus creating a false impression of oneself. I believe that those who use this score would augment it with other aspects of one’s social presence and accomplishments before Making any decision however.