Presentation for University of Colorado Journalism & Mass Communication graduate students, Fall 2011

1. Who are you on the Web?
Why your Web presence is important
Sept. 30, 2011

2. Why worry?
✤ Students, friends, prospective employers will Google you
✤ You need to control your brand, your image

3. What does this
tell you?

4. What does this
tell you?
To me: i ride a bike, don’t wear Mellow
Jonny’s elitist gear, did RAGBRAI, like
pigs, hey, that’s the Dove she’s holding!

5. Today:
✤ Your brand/logo/pitch
✤ LinkedIn
✤ Facebook
✤ Your own website
✤ Twitter

6. First question:
✤ Who are you? Who do you want to be?
✤ Try it in six words
✤ Try it in a sentence
✤ In some instances, you’ll want a story/narrative

7. The social media mullet:
✤ LinkedIn is the business in the front
✤ Facebook is the party in the back
✤ Is Twitter the Mohawk?

8. LinkedIn
✤ An online resume
✤ Keep up with professional contacts
✤ Network with groups
✤ Search for jobs

9. Facebook
✤ Have fun with friends
✤ Share your work
✤ Share your friends’ work
✤ Track key sources
✤ Send msgs to hard-to-reach sources

10. Consider...
✤ A personal page and a professional one
✤ A personal page and a “fan” page
✤ Now “subscribers”
✤ You can filter who sees what you post
✤ It’s complicated
✤ Anything you do online is public

11. Your own page
✤ So you own your name as a URL? Check on name.com
✤ You should buy it if you can - about $10 a year
✤ If not, you need to find an alternative - middle initial, a spin on it

12. Why have your own site?
✤ It should be a first-stop in search
✤ Display your work
✤ Display your resume
✤ Blog/write about your passion

13. Some examples
✤ Melita Garza
✤ Morgan Heim
✤ Lisa Marshall
✤ Luke Trautwein
✤ Jordan Wirfs-Brock

14. Hosting
✤ You could get it for free:
✤ CU offers web hosting
✤ wordpress.com or blogger.com
✤ Dan S. knows of sites
✤ You could pay:
✤ more versatility, room, control

15. CMS/design considerations
✤ HTML pages you code yourself
✤ Blog platforms such as Wordpress, blogger, etc.
✤ Combo of the two
✤ Frameworks such as Drupal, Django, Rails

16. HTML/code it yourself
✤ You can use basic text editor
✤ More sophisticated editors:
✤ Komodo Edit
✤ Text Wrangler
✤ Xcode on Mac
✤ Other software:
✤ Adobe’s Dreamweaver

17. Blogging platforms
✤ Wordpress - the .com for free, the .org for hosted
✤ Blogger - no longer hosted, via google
✤ Movable type
✤ Typepad

18. Why i prefer Wordpress
✤ Many, many free themes
✤ Many, many plug-ins
✤ Static pages are versitile
✤ Large support community
✤ You can be as basic or as complex as you like
✤ Based on PHP

19. Frameworks
✤ Requires some programming/coding experience
✤ It’s a plug-in/component system with a CSS wrapped around it
✤ Examples:
✤ Ruby on Rails
✤ Drupal (PHP)
✤ Django (Python)

20. Also, the Twitter!
✤ Great for following news, sports, celebs, specialty topics, experts
✤ Real-time interactivity
✤ It’s about building community
✤ Good for promoting your work and that of others
✤ Tracking sources
✤ Tracking trends
✤ Breaking news

21. Twitter tools
✤ Tweetdeck
✤ Hootsuite
✤ Twitter on iPhone or iPad

22. Potential hazards
You can delete it, but it won’t go away...

23. Then there’s the Google+
✤ Great for video conferencing, aka “hangout”
✤ Can divide people into streams/circles (why Facebook recently
changed)
✤ But maybe this is all too much...