Recently, while on Facebook, two separate situations made me fully aware of just how much information there is about us. One teenage cousin posted an extremely explicit status update about a recent (ahem) "encounter" with a boyfriend. WAY too much information for me. And later, when I announced that I was going on vacation, a friend commented on my status and asked when I was going. I was reluctant to answer because anyone who viewed my status would see the dates that my house was going to stand empty… and ready for a thief. Not all of my 300 friends are people I would trust. (Yes, many of them are, of course, but not ALL of them).

Like Hansel and Gretel, everywhere we go we leave breadcrumbs about ourselves in the form of profiles, bios, information and data.

There’s the website and the blog that we all have. And we’re familiar with our profile page on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and other similar sites. There are other sites that can gather info on you and your business crawling the web for links. ZoomInfo.com and Jigsaw are that I’m most familiar with but we’ve all heard of Hoovers and InfoUSA and there are others.

Every article we publish online has a bio which is a breadcrumb. Every link we message we leave in a forum is a breadcrumb. Every tweet we post is a breadcrumb.

When we add all of these together, will people find you? And what will they think?

Our online identities, when done well, speak as one voice that clearly summarize us to others, no matter where they find the breadcrumb. But when not done well, they display just a fuzzy picture that doesn’t help our business at all.

So, how can we manage our online identities?

Start by creating a short bio about yourself and using that as your one and only bio around the web. Wherever possible, change your bio to reflect this new one.

Use a site like DandyID to gather together all of your social identities into one place. And use PeoplePond to as a verifiable place to identify who you are and as a single website to give out to others.

Want to read more about managing your identity? There are great resources and articles out there already to help you. Here are some of our favorite:

• Pew Internet did a study on online identity management with some interesting findings. People are becoming more aware of it… but not nearly enough yet (in my opinion): http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Digital-Footprints.aspx?r=1

• Forbes takes a slightly different approach (less about coherence and veracity and more about its usefulness in your life): http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/01/manage-online-reputation-technology-identity.html

• Mashable has a great list: 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity (http://mashable.com/2007/09/10/online-identity/). This list is more like a list of website tools you can use to manage your identity.

• ClaimID (http://claimid.com/) has a list of best practices to manage your online identity. It’s a great article, actually, with plenty of useful tips that people should do from time to time.

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Here’s a scenario that is all-too-familiar on the web: You’ve engaged an audience (in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), you’ve got them visiting your website and blog, downloading information and perhaps signing up for a newsletter.

But when you contact them to sell, they’re just not ready. Maybe it feels like you just aren’t yet speaking the language that resonates with them. Maybe they don’t feel that you’re the one who can help them just yet. Whatever the case may be, they need one more engagement. One great way to create an interactive engagement that can help them, AND you, is with Google Forms.

You’re likely familiar with GoogleDocs – the collaborative online word processing program offered at http://docs.google.com. It’s a great service that rivals the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. Well, this same program offers something else: A publishable form that users can fill out which will automatically input their data into a spreadsheet for you. Here’s how it works.

Go to http://docs.google.com and sign in. (We’re assuming here that you have a Google account, so if you don’t have one, you’ll need to do that first.

At the main page (which contains your folders and recent docs), click the "Create New" button to see a list. See the "Forms" link? Click it. Voila, you’re half way there. Now it’s time to create your form.

You can create a long page of many questions and Google gives you a number of data-types to choose from: text, checkbox, multiple choice, scale, etc. Simple create some main text, supporting text, and choose the data type. Oh, and you can also indicate whether or not this is to be a required question or not.

Repeat the process for every question you want to ask. When you’re done, click "Save" and Google will give you a link where the form will be publicly available. You can link to it or embed it in your own website.

So, what do you do with it? There are a number of things but in your marketing efforts you can use it as a way to get a little more information out of prospects and show them that you are thinking about their situation.

For example, give them 5 questions to answer about the situation they’re facing or the problem they have. Make them easy questions with scales and checkboxes and just one text box. Offer them something for filling out the form. They’ll spend a few minutes answering the questions and, when they’ve finished and pressed send, you’ll have engaged them for a few moments.

That engagement is invaluable because it is a few minutes of their time in which you’re highlighting the problem and connecting yourself in their mind with a solution. And, they’re investing a little bit of time into helping you understand the problem so, subconsciously, they are investing some time into you. Even if you don’t get a lot of information out of them right away (and you won’t want to ask for too much) you will still have established a fair amount of credibility which you can later use to offer them a truly unique solution.

Of course, there are other ways to use Google Forms, too, but this is a great way to engage your audience.

Contemporary VA

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