Online Persona Management and Internet Marketing / Domozych Media

With Facebook, FriendFeed, and Twitter we are seeing the beginnings of a real time web strategy for constant celebrity contact with their fan base. Serena Williams may be the perfect new media star, with Neil Gaiman a close second. Both use new media for constant contact, both talk back through media to their fans and respond in real time, and both are genuine, sincere folk who do what they love best and have integrated their use of new media with their lifestyle.

There are many others – obviously we provide a shout-out on our podcasts to the genius behind Nine Inch Nails, a musical act which brought Alternate Reality Gaming to a whole new level, now effectively crowdsourcing the fan base to create ongoing media presence from thousands of different points online at once. There are others out there who get it, and are able to manipulate their layers of involvement with media to present themselves in the best possible light.

Others work tirelessly to patrol their own reputation – an SEO firm going through internal shake-up splinters off in rumors and half-told tales online briefly. Internet marketers are rarely outed as scammers, or abusers of the ongoing opt-in charges applied to credit card holders in continuity models, mainly because they’re better at playing the game than their accusers.

But they’re not the winners in social media – it’s the people who are open, honest, and accessible – because social media is a space for vetting, and reputation is an acquisition. Page rank is less important than ‘trust’ in the eyes of the search engines, but also in the social structures that are embedded within the larger superstructure. Neil didn’t end up on first-name basis with the internet because of a brilliant SEO campaign, he got there because people felt like they were on a first-name basis with him and acted as such by linking to his site by his first name.

There’s a lesson there, and we hope that if you’d like to know more about our approach to social media and internet marketing, you’ll drop us a line.