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Claim your Domain

It's great to be back here. It's always a pleasure to be a creative life, thanks to my students here in the class and hide everybody out there online. I had a great time last night reading all the tweets and Facebook updates and responding to people and thank you for the social media love and keep loving each other, cause as all reinforced today, one of the best ways to build your online reputation is to reach out and complement and retweet and share and connect with others. So I really hope that's one of the messages that comes through from this. I want to start with just kind of a couple of quotes. Bill Gates once said, If you can't make it good, at least make it look good. So if you're feeling like you don't quite have your online image, right, just, you know, get a beautiful photo up there, something that looks good. Thicket. Although most of us who care at all about designing computers probably favor this man, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Doesn't that sound like Stev...

e Jobs? Not the kind of thing he would say, and that actually I think, is the secret sauce to social media designed today that in this world where your images are gonna get moved around and adjusted, those profile photos could be down here on the left or up here in the middle. And different sites are gonna put them in different places depending on which device they're using. How big your computer screen is. Ah, simpler design is gonna work best across all those different platforms, so it's nice to get fancy. I'll show some inspiring examples. I hope that take things to another level today. But really, at the end of the day, if you want to play it safe, if you want the kind of simple solution to a good online design, I would definitely go with Steve Jobs. Quote. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, So yesterday we talked a little bit about what is the best social media site. Anybody come up with a solid answer to that? What is the best social media site pre? What is the answer to that? J. D. You want to try it? Either one of you fight over what's the best social media site? The ones you're on? Oh, well, you know, as I said, it's all about you, right? So that's a fantastic answer. There is no right answer to that question. It's about who your audience is, what your message is, what your goals are online. So I like that. The one you're on. There's another thing we talk about, what's the best camera in the world? And I know because there were a lot of photographers people will get very Sony, Canon Nikon. They will go to blows over this. And I think the best answer to that is the best camera in the world is the one you have with you when the image appears in front of you, right? So there is something to just making the most of where you are and what you're doing. And just to reiterate some of the statistics, obviously Facebook gets the most attention out there. Social media sites. YouTube, you'll see in a second also has a huge audience, but LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus we'll talk about today, also have their place and are important in the world. And I think increasing number of us use multiple sites. So I'm not saying all of you out there should be on 20 different social media sites. That's really too much for any of us. Most of us probably do best by picking two or three. That we consistently update, or even one that we really hone in and focus on is better than spreading yourself across six and not really paying attention to any of them are updating them regularly. Facebook, YouTube, Google plus Twitter. These are just some of the numbers out there. I think it's easy toe kind of Forget what an extraordinary change social media is in the world. I love the historic perspective you gave us, Jim. With that that quick flashback in the pre show, Jim was talking about some of the things that led up to where we are today, how there was something called Friendster once that you know, has evolved to my spay or got replaced by my space and out done by my space and everybody thought MySpace and one and now it's Facebook. But one of the things that's very clear is we watched. This evolution is that there are new social media sites that emerge, and today, as I mentioned yesterday, there are more young people on Instagram than on Facebook in the US and Facebook is starting to be the place to reach moms. And Grandma's Instagram is more the place to meet young people and to reach them so constantly looking at where are people moving to? Where is the action happening? Where the conversations taking place that matter to one of the things I'll talk about today in a very last session of the day, I have kind of round up of some of my favorite social media tools and some of those air for measuring the opinions of other people. Some of those air for tracking what's going on, a different sites, looking at trends, a really good way to measure your own impact and find the best way for you to reach people is to use those tools and to spend as much time reading and listening to what other people have to say as you do, posting and presenting things yourself and often the best use of social media is actually getting information from others, not just putting it out to them. Your attention is one of the greatest gifts you can give someone else, and taking the time to listen to somebody can often be much more empowering to them and much more endearing than just sending more information their way. So a couple designed quick tips just toe go over yesterday. I know a lot of the students here creativelive jump in and out of these classes or they missed the first day and they're coming in on the second. So I like to reinforce some of the things that we talked about. Facebook, obviously, is the more kind of casual place, so your profile on Facebook can be a more casual design, where pages and groups tend to be more professional. Eso, if you're thinking about your personal site, is your profile. Everybody on Facebook custom a profile? Then you can create pages and groups, and those in terms of design tend to be more professional. Lincoln is highly professional, not a lot of design options there, but definitely a behavior you want to remember. There. Twitter can be professional or personal, and that, I think, is part of why Twitter can be a little intimidating to people. There's a special vocabulary. They're very limited characters, how much you can say there, and some people use it in a very professional, authoritative way, and some people using a very casual way, and that could make it a little hard to know how to fit in. I think one of the deeper messages that I want to share is you need to figure out what your voice is, what your style is and try and be consistent with that. So if you're working on developing a professional, authoritative voice, then that should be the main way. You present yourself from images to post to what you say, but if you have more of a sort of snarky, hip, casual blawg and you want to be known more for that than that should be your more consistent messaging. And the thing to avoid, I think, is being trying to be all of those things that we're trying to be. Different things in every different site can really confuse your audience and dilute your message. So getting more consistent yourself about how you present yourself in each of those sites if you're a little more Starkey and playful than you might be a little more stark in Playful. Even on Lincoln, where most people are more professional, maybe kind of a silly or photo or something that shows your personality more. Whereas if you're more professional than even in your Facebook profile, you might want to keep that general professionalism. Then Google, as we said a little more geeky. It's a great place for hangouts and video chats. We're gonna talk a little bit about Google plus this morning and get started with that tight yesterday. One of the people in the chat room, I don't if she's there this morning. Kate Harnisch Boenisch Not sure how to save her last name. Thank you, Kate, for sharing this. Kate turns out to be one of the first people that I know on Facebook to use the new Facebook pages design and I with her permission, I'm going to give you a quick sneak preview, Come over here and bring her up. So within the last week, Facebook has announced that they're changing the way they do Facebook page designs. Based on what I see here, that isn't as radical changes I first feared when I saw that announcement. One of the biggest changes is in this area here. There used to be little squares that you could use to highlight your email newsletter. Sign up for your videos on YouTube. Those have now been moved down here on the left side here. So they've really changed some things in terms of how what you can put at the top of the page reading between the lines. I don't have any particular insight into Facebook, but I know they're definitely trying to push more and more people to advertise. And I suspect some of that moving those promotional buttons down the page may be part of their overall desire to try and get people to promote themselves more through paid advertisements and promoted posts and less make it less obvious. You're shaking your head, JD. You don't like this, do you? Why does this? Why does this bother you so much? It just moves away from being ableto give content or toe show people where you're focusing your business on and just kind of hide it and makes it almost looked like a personal page again. And it just seems like they keep burying more and more stuff and funneling us into that model of, and I get it. It's a business. They're trying to make money, but it just seems like they're constantly isolating their customers that are using them, so I don't know. Well, I think it is a challenge, and I really expect a certain amount of pushback in the coming weeks and months. As Twitter made this radical redesign that just took anybody who had taken time to create a background and a cover and all that had to completely start over with the new redesign. It was such a radical change. This change is much more subtle in terms of the deadline. If you have a banner that's been working for you, you can probably continue to use it. Um, but I think, yeah, moving those buttons down after people put so much time in creating those tabs and integrating email and integrating their other social sites. I think Facebook must have felt that was driving people off Facebook. And that's another reason that sites tend to do things like move links lower on the page. They want you to be engaged with this page before you go somewhere else. But that said, when you when you've invested a lot of time and developing your social media design and then it sort of gets pulled away from you, I think it gets harder and harder to get people to go back and want to do it again. So I expect there'll be some push back from people, both with the Facebook redesign and the Twitter redesign. Pretty soon you'll see how Google Plus has redesigned quite a bit over time as well. Again, I think one of the biggest challenges of teaching this class in one of the biggest challenges of doing social media design today is that it's this constantly in flux world and even more than the Web, where we've had to create responsive designs that adjust and adapt in social media, you don't get to control. When those design changes happen, you have to really stay abreast of them and be ready to make changes. And that's part of why simpler designs are probably going to serve you better in the long run. So if you want a messaging, if you wanna have really clear messaging like Kate does about her real estate business, you may have to be more thoughtful and be ready to redesign quickly. Because words getting overlapped as one of the biggest problems in social media design, things become unreadable. If the text that the site has overlaps text you've put into your cover image, so she's at risk of that with this design. If you just use a beautiful image of a house and a few words, you would probably have less chance that that would happen in the future. But it's a choice you have to make. The more you designed. The more you put into that banner, the more likely you're gonna have to redesign it frequently and quickly when things change any other changes. If anybody in the Internet hello Internet has noticed any other changes or has had their, uh, they're page updated, I'd be interested in seeing other Facebook pages. I haven't yet gotten invited to do it, so I'm sure I will probably tonight just because of the timing of this class. But I would welcome other examples if anybody wants to share one or if they have any other comments about about those changes there. It's a perfect example this week of the constant flux and social media design that even as I'm teaching this class, Facebook is changing the design of their pages. All right, another thing I said, and I really want to reinforces the importance of claiming your name, even if you're not ready to create profiles on the hot new social site, if you don't have one on INSTAGRAM yet, if you are not involved in vine yet these air some of the newest sites people are talking about. I think it's really important to take a little time today and just reserve your name on those sites so that if those become more important, Teoh. If your audience migrates to those later, you can go there with authority and with the name that your best known for. And if you don't do that, other people are likely to take your name. So registering your name on those top social sites and keeping an ear to the ground about what's the hot new social sites this week and going and just just signing up. Even if you do a minimalist profile, reserving your name is really a valuable thing to Dio. Onley takes a few minutes while you're at it. If you haven't registered, your own name is a domain name. I also recommend that, and wherever you can on your social sites, it's I think it's good to link back to your own site and to your own domain name and again. Part of that's because people spent a tremendous amount of time building huge followings on MySpace and when MySpace stuffed, being so popular, all that investment in building an audience really had to be reinvested in Facebook and other sites. And you can find yourself having to recreate your audience or refined your audience over and over. The more you can get them to your own mailing list, the more you can get them to your own website. The more you'll be ableto own that audience and take it with you as you move on to other social sites yourself. So having a domain name that's for your business, for your name for your Children. When my husband and I started dating, I realized he hadn't registered his own name yet. And because this is something I've been pushing for 15 years now, way back when we met, I was like, Wow, he doesn't own David La Fontaine. That's I better grab that for him. We've only been dating for a couple weeks. Then it was kind of embarrassed to admit it to him like it's that kind of creepy and stalker is like, you know, it's like photo shopping. Are pictures together to see how our kids are gonna look. Maybe I shouldn't tell him. So I think we've been dating for at least three or four months before we started talking about websites. So I was like, Oh, by the way, I could help you build a website, if you like. Yeah, I already own your own. Do you already owned your name? So fortunately, he married me. So I guess I guess he wasn't creeped out by it. But I do recommend parents register their Children's names. Spouses register each other's names. If your spouse is being resistant, you can help them out. He wasn't resistant. He just hadn't thought of it. But, um but yeah, the other thing, as you think about your name is think about a name and a title and a photo that you can use consistently across all those sites. And if you've got that set up, you're already using that on Facebook. LinkedIn Twitter, that when you set up your instagram account, you've already got your photo ready to go. You've already got the basic text ready to go talk today. A little bit about writing your own biography, too, because that's one of the biggest challenges of presenting yourself online. And I think much more important than many people realize in designing your social media presence is not just the images you use but the words and how you describe yourself. I'm gonna give you some tips about how to write the hardest thing you'll ever write. But once you've got that title, once you've got that basic biography, setting up those new social sites is pretty easy and keeping all that in one safe folder someplace. You know, I keep all my different social media designed, although now I've got the design I had last week in the design I have this week and the one I was testing yesterday. My folders are a little complicated, but saving all of those social media pieces of information in one place makes it easier to launch new sites as you go. And I also recommend that you keep a list of links of all the social media sites you have. Sometimes we forget. Oh, I also haven't about me Page. I should go update. If you agree with me that you should use a consistent photo across all your sights. Then when you change that profile photo online, you need to go change it on all of them and just having a even a word document. Oh, are some other text file that has the Earl of each of your social sites really handy for? You can just make it quicker toe log into each one, change the profile photo, do that all at once so that you keep that consistent look even as you refresh your different profile sites. Two quick tools that I showed yesterday I know Jim was particularly thought these were particularly useful. Noam and which is a K n o w e m dot com and name check and a m e c h k with no e c k just chk name. Check and Noam are both sites where you can search for your name and quickly identify whether it's still available on social sites and then easily From there. You can link over to those sites, set up a new profile and come back just a very efficient way to do that. So if you haven't registered your name on most all the sites that I'm covering in this class and maybe a few others that are relevant to your audience, your business, your message. Then I would say that's probably your biggest homework and maybe the thing to do in the background while you're listening to me Talk here on creativelive have an audience poll because I got some some feedback yesterday that people were really upset. I hadn't asked this question yet. Um, I think that, uh, in the Creative Live chat room there is a really wonderful energy and history, and some of it goes back to an instant that it but that involved bacon. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, when I sing bacon creativelive, go into the loans and please somebody in the lounge, explain or link Teoh our copy and paste. The last time you explain what Bacon was really about. Creativelive teaching here is a wonderful experience. The people that I meet here are incredible, but what's going on in the chat rooms here? Creativelive is one of the more interesting elements of this whole experiment in online learning and the fact that there are three chat rooms that you can all participate in and one of them is called the Lounge, and one of them is just the place to kind of hang out and connect with each other. And do things like talk about bacon or, Well, okay, so bacon was started by another instructor. Many, many You're not many years ago, but long before I got here, I came in with the chocolate thing. It started kind of a rivalry. Okay, I started it. E set out to replace bacon with chocolate in the chat rooms. So true to that mission at Creativelive and by popular demand, I'm asking the chat rooms again, toe way in bacon or chocolate, which is better, which should be the most important food group in creative life. And I'm always open toe learning new things and being challenged. So if it's not taken or chocolate, throw out your crazy suggestions. I like blueberries, too. It's alright, but really opening that up. Bacon or chocolate? I know you've been waiting for that in the Internet chat room, so here it is. I'll come back to gym in a little while. I know it's gonna take a while to tabulate the score on this one, but from Zaza's odd you know, you do know what bacon stands for. Correct? Go ahead. Beats any chicken honor guessing the chickens. Like where could be beats any chocolate on I e have to say that. That's clever. All right. You got me there. No bacon, doesn't he? Chocolate and my Yes, please, go ahead. Talk about bacon and chocolate. Yeah, I really feel like this is the wrong like question. Actually, I almost feel like why can't we just have bacon covered in chocolate? And there she is, the diplomat in the room. I just I love you for for coming to that right away because I usually kind of wait to see who will suggest that. And bacon covered chocolate has been proposed before. I'm not personally a fan, but I know people who rave about it, and I really do try to make everybody happy. That's very important to me. So J d I'm glad you're here with me in the desire toe to unite the chat rooms and stop the flame wars. Chocolate covered bacon is a reasonable solution. I like that. Okay, uh, Shantel looking at us like I'm still kind of new here. What? What are you even talking about. Yeah. All right, fair enough. Do you know about the bacon thing? JD? Have you been informed of the bacon story? I know in the chat room they're telling each other, but now I feel bad That shan't tell us and part of the story here. I'm actually a former chat room host. So I used to hang out in the lounge a lot and have a lot of bacon chat. And, uh, yeah, I'm down with the bacon. But where did it start? I believe it's Jason Hoppy. And and then we've got Kathy Dyleski. That also continues on the big in love with her amazing felt bacon people. Yeah, amazing felt bacon. People who knew you could make people out of bacon made of felt, if you have to see it to believe it. I believe Jason did a lesson and Photoshopped on layers, and he layered layers of bacon on top of each other, and it made such an impression. It sort of became a mean right. Everybody knows the word MIM and the Internet is full of Mihm's. Creativelive has a couple of means, and one of them is chocolate. So if you want to fit in in the chat rooms. You want to be part of the cool club. You have to understand Bacon's important. But if you want to be part of my club, you have to embrace chocolate. At least in addition, if that is a replace Brie, any comments on bacon or chocolate? You're really kind of It's all good. All right, we'll take that. All right. Oh, I'm leaving this chocolate. Really given its chocolate. Yep. Sorry. Bacon, Chocolate squeeze. You check that tally one more time because that might rally the bacon lovers so well, there's a lot of bacon in here, but I think a good 20% are saying chocolate, especially the vegetarians. Oh, there is, the vegetarian continued. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, and there's even vegan chocolate so you can eat chocolate as a vegan. But you really can't do bacon. Not real. Never mind waken Take this to an absurd extreme, but it's a nice way to start the day with a little humor