Twitter is probably my favorite social media tool. It is short, direct and honest. I find it is a great tool for following the latest news, tracking the ideas and activities of friends and other interesting people and allowing me to share my own thoughts and links.
Recently Twitter introduced a lists feature. This allows us to segment the people they follow on Twitter into groups. These lists have been useful in organizing people and organizations that I follow by sector, geography, content, activities and other categories. However, what I find even more interesting is how Twitter lists help show how others see me. In other words, my personal brand. While we all have an image of our selves that we try and project to others, what matters most is how other perceive us. The names of the Twitter lists that you appear on gives you a useful pool of information about how your personal brand is perceived by Twitter users.
Through social media strategist Jason Baer’s site, I found out about a tool created by Joseph Jaramillo . This tools allows you to pull the words out of the lists that your followers have grouped you in. Using this list, you can create tag cloud at Wordle.net.
Here are my results from this exercise:
According to my Twitter followers it is evident that I live in Phoenix and am involved in downtown and social media (and am even considered a ‘local celebrity’ by someone!) What I find most interesting about this list, however, is that despite my efforts to brand myself as an urbanist, this effort is not really reflected in how others see me. Part of this is due to the fact that I post a lot of my urban related comments under my JanesWalkPhx account. While I initially started this account to promote the Jane’s Walk event in May, it has since morphed into my urban persona, and is where I discuss and share my thoughts on urban issues. I now an seeing the drawbacks of this approach to my branding. As a result, I will begin posting more of my urban content under my name to strengthen that aspect of my personal brand.
Now if only somebody could do the same thing for social interactions. I would love to see what others thing of my personal brand through how I come across in face-to-face interactions!
Hey celebrity,
Did you make it to my personal branding talk at PodCamp AZ? I touched on some of these topics. A personal brand barometer like the list + wordle combo would’ve been great to have 4+ years ago!
Great post. Of course, this only works for public lists. It would be interesting to see what brand emerges from private lists. I suspect that many people, including me, might find themselves on someone’s private “jackass” list once in a while. Maybe some day, Twitter’s private lists will be accidentally revealed, just as Amazon’s Canadian site accidentally revealed anonymous reviewer identities a few years back, leading to numerous discoveries of authors reviewing their own books, panning rivals’ books, etc.
I’ve seen the tag clouds around and really like the inadvertent result of the Twitter lists. It happens to work out (for me) in your post that your list cloud is directly next to your tag cloud. It’s interesting to me that they similarly reflect each other. Your largest tags are Community and Downtown Phoenix. Since you choose the tags yourself based upon what you write about, I suggest changing the way you tag (or blog) to help reflect your goal of being known as an urbanist.
Brain, I wasn’t able to make it to your personal branding presentation. Are the slides and/or notes available?
David, public lists are a good start nonetheless!
Sharon. Great point about my blog tags. In retrospect, I haven’t blogged much about urbanism, not sure why, other than I’m still trying to find my online voice, and i find it easier to link to others on Twitter than to create my own content here. This is something that will need to change.