Perhaps it’s just a link to social presence or whatever else, but it’s pretty important for you to have something, because you can best be sure that people are going to look and do their homework before they meet you.

Now that we have that fact out of the way, let’s talk about the details of such a site. Do you really want to give away all of your trade secrets? No, you don’t. But what do I mean by trade secrets, anyway? After all, you do want people to discover you, right? You need to let folks know how much you know your stuff.

How can you do that without giving away the farm? Here are a few tips, though your mileage may vary with each, I think it’s the sort of stuff you need to know, but that no one will tell you until well after it ceases to be useful:

1. Don’t copy the style of your favorite ___________. It makes sense that you’d go to the site of someone you admire, see what they do and maybe graft together a few styles into your own cohesive thing. The problem here is, you’re trying to make someone else’s style work for you. Maybe it can, but chances are, it’s going to be hard to pull off long term. Put another way, you might borrow a shirt from a friend, but if you two had to switch closets, it’s likely that you’re going to spend several hours of each day a bit uncomfortable. The lesson? Don’t worry about anyone else’s talents. Just do you.

2. Be concise. It can be tempting to tell your life story. Then you remember that no one spends very long on these sites, the analytics confirm it and you just spent an inordinate amount of time telling very personal stories that don’t make the sale. People love human interest stories, but they like them in books or in visual formats that don’t require them to work for it. So unless your entire presence is around a blog that you’ll be updating constantly and it relates directly to what you’re offering up, just keep it simple and clear.

3. Know your audience. Not just the people you want to reach, but the ones that are actually stopping in. Find out who they are and make sure when they get there, they’re getting what they need from you.

4. Understand your goal(s). Intent is huge. If you’re making a site to attract potential clients, that’s one thing. If you’re creating a web presence that’s really just an extension of your personal brand, but isn’t a place where you expect to generate the majority of your contacts/clients, etc., then you can take a different approach in developing your content. It’s really up to you. Your goals may change, but remember to stay the course. It can be tempting to change horses in mid-stream, but if you keep getting out of line to get in new ones at the supermarket, you’ll never checkout and leave the store.

Conclusion: I’m going back to the idea of minding your competition. Everything you say or put out there is open fodder for whoever is competing with you. While you’re not focused on them, as much as you are the stuff you’re doing, it’s important to mind your consistency.

The literature on your site should be enticing and drive interest, but if there are things that set you apart that you’re using to close deals in client meetings and in proposals, don’t go spewing this stuff on the web for someone to retrofit for their purposes and take.  Ideally, you’ll grow and adapt your messages and it won’t matter.

Remember, no matter what you say, if you can’t deliver on those promises it won’t make a difference how great your sales pitch is.

People who’ve read me for a while know I like golf.

Back when I was just learning tennis and spent my weekends fishing with my grandfather, the other thing we shared was watching golf on TV. Of course, this was pre-Tiger. Nonetheless, the whole story about his “transgressions” has gripped me, but only because it’s made me think about self-image and the way we brand ourselves in this digital age and how some folks think they can control the story when it runs amok.

Whether you’re a fourth tier school in a town that no one outside of your local area cares about; as far as the media in that area are concerned, you’re the big dog on the block and some intrepid reporter is going to get the scoop. It’ll just continue to get worse, but we’ll accept it more and more as the tools become more insidious.

Is this is a sign of our declining times or a triumph in historical proportions? I don’t know.

I do know, that not everyone can manage authenticity. For every person who is able to communicate themselves in a manner that allows them to reach wider audiences and tell great stories; to share in a manner that gives their readers or followers a true feeling of connectedness, there are lots who’ll haven’t the foggiest clue how to do that. Authenticity is about being yourself and you simply can’t fake that. You can change your culture, while staying true to your values.

That’s what Team Tiger needs to realize right now. You might want to stay silent, keep your mouth shut and let the company line do the talking. After all, whether it’s three women or three hundred who come out and say they went to the zoo with Tiger, it’s going to sting the same and the scrutiny won’t be any less. Sometimes a crisis can be an opportunity to break the impulse to continue with business as usual within an organization

Your school might probably doesn’t have the brand of Tiger Woods, but you can learn from his disaster. The inclination to believe that internal problems should stay internal makes sense. And some stories just have legal implications that prevent you from really putting much out there. If you’ve built relationships and try to capture the goodwill of whoever you fanbase is; you’ll be able to find ways to create opportunities from even the most horrid situations. You have to remember that the dust will settle eventually and you’ll have to move on from whatever the circumstance is, so the sooner you put a plan in place to do that, the better off you’ll be.

Rather than detail what Tiger Woods ought to do (simply put: re-brand himself as a real person, rather than an automaton. Oh and win a Grand Slam.) let’s talk about something a bit more topical:

Binghamton University men’s basketball comes off its best season in school history, then crisis strikes:

The scandal at Binghamton highlights the way intangible sports benefits so sought after by university administrators — like increased visibility and buzz — can backfire. The university is facing an investigation by the State University of New York into accusations that it bent its academic standards to build a competitive men’s basketball team. Three of the team’s players have been arrested in the past three years, including one in September on charges of selling crack cocaine. This fall, six players were dismissed from the team. The athletic director has resigned, the basketball coach has been placed on paid leave, and university administrators have been accused of retaliating against an instructor who said she was pressured to show grading favoritism to athletes.

So far, the web site strategy seems to be “focus on other programs besides men’s basketball.” That’s smart. But how are the coaches supposed to recruit with a team under turmoil?

Here are a few ideas:

- Establish your values publicly and stick to them. The language on the basketball site should communicate the values of the program loudly. If it’s clear there were none before, you establish some and demonstrate your commitment to them throughout the year. It gives you fodder for the entire season and while it could be something that could be program-wide for all sports, having it reflect on the sport that everyone is paying attention to, helps your recruiting effort by giving parents ease that you’ve weeded out the “bad apples” and you’re heading in a new direction and gives potential recruits a sense of ease they’re heading into a ship that’s steadying, rather than inking their signature to join the Titantic.

Side note: One of the reasons I hate the trend of schools using their big-box athletic web site CMS is they lack the flexibility to do much of anything beyond the standard package of 1) post news stories 2) post scores 3) post bios and pictures. If the sites were more nimble, you’d have the ability to brand to the individual sports and adapt the pages more fluidly for all sorts of situations. But I’ll save that bully pulpit for another post.

- A basketball team blog that features players and coaches.
Highlight the good things going on, how hard they’re working and ultimately, reconfirm why they’re glad to be where they are. For a regional public university, you’re not tapping on tons of people to begin with. But you do have an audience and you are actively pushing your message out. And for better or worse, the negative publicity you’re getting is going to drive traffic to your site. Use it as an opportunity to tell your own story, rather than letting media reports and press releases do all of the talking.

- The 13th Man: A viral show Unless they’re sports fans, students don’t really connect with student-athletes. Athletes tend to run in their own cliques at most schools, save for the few who branch out and students don’t really understand a lot of the sacrifices made by top-level college athletes. So you announce a new promotion. At each home game, a student would suit up and become the 13th man. They’ll practice with the team once or twice, dress for the game, sit on the bench and participate the whole experience. It’s like fantasy camp (no, they can’t play) but with a personal twist. Students would sign up in droves for the experience, too. Video-tape the whole deal and showcase it on your site. Maybe have them blog about their experience. This might be considered a mockery, but when things are a complete mess anyway, I don’t see how it could hurt anything and it’d be fairly easy to do, even if you didn’t do at each home game, but only a few times during the season.

I realize these sorts of ideas can’t happen overnight. They also require a lot of buy-in and commitment from the team at large, that taking a bold approach to marketing is going to solve the PR issues that come from a crisis that causes your program a black-eye. It requires support and when there’s a cloud hanging over a program and the last thing some people want to do is smile for the camera. But if you’re paying them, you have leverage and if they won’t, someone else will seize the opportunity.

You have to do something. The days of stonewalling in the hopes of making a story go away are over. In the end, it’s far better to be on offense when you can, because once you’re defending it’s hard to turn the tide back before you’re consumed by it.

An interesting conversation for sure. (HT @maids_zenith)

I went from the Air Force to college, so I had about eight years of unadulterated time to indulge in my interests, while working and I think I used the time pretty wisely. But then I started working and changed the formula up.

I’m not sure if I just thought I had to do it because I was “grown up” at that point or if there was some other catalyst for it. But there’s no doubt that what I used to talk about online, I no longer do.

Why this is important is really related to my interests and the expression of the things I’m really passionate about. The fact is, I never talk about anything other than music. Maybe because it’s safe. Perhaps, when I feel like potential employers, colleagues, clients and online people who’ve never met me in real life will read what I write because I’m afraid they’re going to misunderstand my points.

Perhaps I’m just overwhelmed by the way the world has emerged online and I’ve failed to adapt my own strategies to accommodate that. I mean, I had a successful, well read blog at a time when few people were blogging and did this for years. Then I stopped as life changed, I moved and decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to say so much. My views have indeed changed over the years and I’m sure that’s helped too. But if you don’t talk to me offline, you’d have no idea of the real path of that evolution because there’s no real record of it anywhere.

This has come up a lot, because about once a month, someone from the past will resurface. They’ll recall the “old” me. Projects I’ve worked on, things I’d done and when I talk about what I do now, I remember why during my last year of college I abhorred the idea of selling out and getting a job before I earned a few more degrees.

I got out of the Air Force in 2002 and went to college full-time after that (I started college in ’01 while still on active duty at Wash U) but took a year off between 2004 and 2005. In part for an internship, but also because I got a job. My parents thought this made a lot more sense, after all, because well…I was 26 at that point and people back home had assumed I’d been in school since 18. I got a lot of “well, are you STILL in school? How many degrees are you getting?!” But I hadn’t been in school even three years at that point. Yet, I felt pressure to work, because that’s what my folks do, y’know?

But in the fall of 2005, I went back to school to finish. In the summer of 2006, I got my first job as a web content editor and a bunch of redesigns, a blog and some other good stuff later, the rest is history.

The point of all of this though, is somewhere along the way I lost my identity. I started to envelope what I did professionally with my life off the web and before I knew it, my career swallowed my self-expression whole. Everything I did became about “growing my profile.” As much as I deride those personal brand builders, I was reading them and snickering on one hand, but quietly letting that methodology influence my dealings online.

What’s strange is, I didn’t hesitate to pull any punches on edustir when it comes to issues in higher ed that I felt needed to be addressed. Yet, when it comes to things outside the realm of higher education, I would shrivel up and stay the neutral course.

Twitter made this worse. No tool has been better for me, in terms of staying connected to folks I’ve met professionally and no tool has been a vehicle for an Isopropyl alcohol-like sanitizing of my online personality like Twitter has. It’s not the medium’s fault, it’s a reflection of my own conservatism and a desire not to be misconstrued at any turn.

As I reflect on it though, I realize that the fearlessness I’ve demonstrated at my peak is the sort of attitude I need to take as I go forward on things. I’ve spoken a lot in the past about the need for people and institutions to use their own understanding of their strengths to represent their product, brand or whatever else in their communications online.

But I’ve come head first into the collision of how executing that in practice, is a whole lot more difficult than doing it in theory. Figuring out where to go next, of course, is a challenge I’m actively confronting.

I realize it’s “weird” for me because I’ve traveled so much (relatively, speaking) in the past few years and it seems that if people get in touch with me every four years, that it seems I’m living in a different state each time (not really true…) and doing something dramatically different (no, really.) than when they talked to me the last time.

Folks who keep in touch often don’t have those missing links, are abreast of everything and as a result, the gaps are less significant (if existent at all) and it makes it easier to talk to them more freely about what you’re up to, what you’re planning to do or are in the midst of doing at that time.

Not that you need to go out of your way to filter your life for folks or that it’s really anyone’s business what you’re doing, unless you make it that way. But, given how many folks can be so important to your life at a particular phase of it, only to disappear and then resurface, there has to be at least some desire to want to make sure that everything sounds great.

I don’t really go out of my way to do that. I mean, there isn’t a point. If they’re even someone I want to talk to at all — versus say, someone from high school who friends you now, but didn’t talk to you a decade ago — I figure they’re worth catching up with and thus, the stories start coming out, though I usually reserve a cliff notes version for most. It still trips me out when someone I don’t know well references something they read on my blog, especially during a presentation or during an job interview. It was cool and made me think, “Gee, this is crazy.” But at the same time, it made me more conscientious of what I was putting out there.

I think this extends to things like online bios and even knowing when to say “when” online writing things. It was great to just vent about whatever when my only readership were folks who knew me especially well. But when random strangers cultivate an image of you based on your blog and maybe a Facebook profile or something, you feel the need sometimes to “stay on message” or to “enhance the brand.”

All of this is especially hilarious as I type it, but it’s really true. In an era where folks are trumpeting this “person as a brand” mantra, you really have to be aware of “what your story is.” I figure that if someone is going to tell it, it might as well come from the source.