Online memorials done by the living for the lost are not new; USA Today last week had a roundup of some military-focused memorial sites and Google Earth released a Map the Fallen map to honor those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the civilian sphere, we’ve also seen funeral homes and obituary listings add guestbooks, group albums, and other forms of interactivity.

From the simplest Web page to the most elaborate official registry, online memorials make people’s achievements accessible, and the interactivity inherent in sharing memories around the dead turns static memorials into nodes for community. After all, as we know, memorials aren’t really for the dead — they’re for the living.

But What Happens to Our Stuff When We Die?
NPR had a piece last week on the death of suicide prevention pioneer Edwin Shneidman (here’s the complete LA Times audio slideshow [contains a few BS-words]). Without getting into the stickier potential discussions on theology and ontology, I’ll just focus on this quote:

“I’ll be dead. And I ‘live’ in my children, in my DNA, in my books, in my reputation.”

To the reputation and legacy bits, we can add in all the stuff that you’ve published online during your lifetime.

Historically, once you achieved a certain bit of fame or notoriety, your body of work had a pretty good chance of outlasting your body, in the pages of books, or the dusty archives of a newspaper’s morgue. If you weren’t famous, maybe you’d live on in a scrapbook, or tax records, or other documents unearthed by a future social historian looking for insight into the life of the everyday person.

With the democratizing effects of the Internet, and the changing expectations of fame and visibility, regular people now have the chance to see and shape the digital legacy that will remain accessible to others after they’re gone. That is, if we can solve that whole impermanence problem — they say that everything you publish is online, forever, but that’s an aphorism, not an archival strategy. Though you can bet that there are businesses looking to cover the needs of preserving your digital life in death, as outlined in this CNN article.

Personal Branding in the Afterlife?
Efforts to maintain your digital self after you’re gone sound suspiciously like an attempt at personal branding in the afterlife. Is there a market for online reputation management after you’re dead? All the usual advice to managing your reputation doesn’t really apply when you can’t reply (because you’re dead). You’re going to need a proxy, someone motivated by either love or money. And this is a real application of trust — after all, you’re not going to be around to check up on folks.

Worry about your digital legacy is a conceit of the living. At a certain point, though, it’s probably better to remember that on a long-enough timeframe, what you’ve done isn’t going to matter too much to people, and it’s more useful to worry about what you’re doing now, than what you’re going to be remembered for.

Are you making provisions for your legacy after you pass? Leave a comment (which will add to your digital body of work).

We don’t need to rehash the details of each event (though I note it’s interesting to visualize the evolution of each  story using Google News Timeline — though for the life of me, I can’t see how to permalink and share a query).

In each case, something bad happened, it went viral (with blogs and Twitter as accelerants), and there was a whole bunch of angst, sturm, drang, and swirl as each affected company was slow to respond.

* The Acceleration of the Outrage Cycle: These two latest events kind of make me look nostalgically back at the good old days of 2004, where it took days, or even weeks, for something to really blow up online (see the Kryptonite Lock controversy, which brewed up on bicycle Web forums.)

The Amazon case was apparently set off by the LiveJournal blog entry of an affected author. Between the nature of fandom and LiveJournal’s pretty good tools for disseminate blog entries among your network of friends and followers, it propagated outward at a, shall we say, rapid pace.

The Domino’s scandal was posted to YouTube. ‘Nuff said.

Lesson: You’ve got to stay on top of things and monitor at all times. And, once you pass a certain threshhold,  “all times” means “all times”: 24/7/365. So make sure you have an escalation plan for all those inconvenient nights/holidays/weekends/vacations.

* Just How Rapid Is Your Rapid Response? Amazon’s response was hobbled by the fact that things blew up on Easter Sunday, which limited their initial response to a lame, canned-sounding message from customer service. In the absence of a better response, this led the way for various attention-seekers to take (false) credit, and also allowed Amazon’s critics to attribute to malice what was later explained by stupidity (and blaming the French).

Originally, I’d thought that Domino’s had responded faster, but this Directorship article in BusinessWeek states that the leadership sat on the issue for 24 hours, not wanting to make things worse. As if.

Lesson: Trust Jack Bauer when he says, “THERE’S NO TIME!” Have contingency plans in place. No plan can cover everything, but if you have a framework and infrastructure in place, you can modify and adapt to specific situations, instead of trying to start from scratch.

Incidentally, this is also why communication and conversation is important when there isn’t a crisis — it builds credibility and networks that you can leverage when you need them.

* Respond in the Right Venue: The AmazonFail furor calmed down not when the official “ham-fisted cataloging error” statement came top-down from Amazon PR, but buttom-up, when Amazon alumni and unauthorized insiders gave enough credible detail, in the blogs, to settle people down. Bloggers were the folks with their hair on fire, so that’s where the most effective response was.

The Domino’s case is a little different, but because it blew up on YouTube, the best place to respond was on YouTube. (Sure, also maintain the forms and issue the release and update the corporate Web site if you want. It’s expected. But recognize that’s not where the influence, audience, and solution lies.)

Lesson: You got to go to the hotspots to put out the fire.

Finally, to beat on drum some more: People don’t believe corporate PR. But they do believe other people. One of two things will happen: PR folks will try to co-opt the process and come up with officially-sanctioned leaks, or they can try doing things above-board and make sure the front-line folks who actually know what’s going on get heard from.

Any other far-reaching and self-serving advice you’d like to share? Leave a comment.

(Why am I writing like this? Short, choppy sentence fragments? Because I just re-read the Tom Peters article about personal branding.)

Anyway, back before we started counting strangers, random acquaintances, and search engine hits as friends and followers, we had a term that more or less covered personal branding: “reputation.”  (This term has also been co-opted by marketing types.)

Back then, reputation meant how you were seen by your peers (as well as other people you dealt with, but your reputation among your peers was key). If you were an average low- to mid-level corporate drone (like me), reputation was all about if you knew what you were talking about, and if you knew how to get stuff done. And unless you made it into the news (either for good or bad accomplishments), reputation propagated pretty slowly, and pretty locally.

Enter the Search Engine

Of course, the Web changed all that, because we started posting more stuff publicly — at first, usually under an online persona or handle. Then, we made things globally accessible. And then we made them easier to find, and then even easier to tie to our true life identities, and then started posting stuff resembling actual work. All of which has pretty much nuked the idea of separate online personas, and paved the way for the concept of a ubiquitous personal brand.

Handles, Nicks and Brands as Shortcuts

Now, this entry started out as simply a followup to my earlier entry about the ubiquity of Twitter handles. For many of us who came up in Web 1.0, our online identities started as handles picked for reasons clever or mundane, which were naturally used for vanity domains, and then were just as naturally used for usernames in the second explosion of online presence.

If you were lucky enough or had enough forethought, you could use the same identity across all these locations (though not the same password, right?). Plus, if you had a relatively common name, or one dominated by someone truly famous, it was a way to route people around to you.

Actually, I still think that handles and nicknames have a value in helping direct people to different aspects of our expertise and ourselves. Hell, that’s what company names are for, right? They’re not meant to obscure identity, but to enhance it. Or at least focus it to particular areas. Depending on your OS, handles are aliases, shortcuts, or symbolic links to your identity.

Now that I think of it, there’s one last downside to personal branding that’s tied to your name, to borrow an example from the security experts. One of the problems with biometrics is that if your information gets compromised, you’re kind of stuck — you can’t get new fingerprints or a new retina (though I guess they’re working on cancelable biometrics now — keep in mind that this is just a metaphor.) If your name is your brand, I suppose you’d just better not screw up. Though I guess it’s easier to change your name than your fingerprint (less painful, too). But still.

Anyway, did any of this make sense? I’m not sure myself. Perhaps I am hurting my personal brand by posting it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Naturally, the fashion originates and applies to we folks in the social media community and online marketing fields, which is still a niche (albeit a growing and disproportionately loud one). Even though Twitter-awareness is crossing into the mainstream (on the backs of celebrities), I’m assuming that sticking an @ sign in front of your name amongst the general population will still evoke more questions than meaningful nods.

Of course, we’ve seen this before — going by your handle is a standard ingroup/outgroup identifier for any online community. AOL types used their screen names (which was a handy way to get both your IM and e-mail address out there); forum users, BBSes, IRC chatters, Flickrites, and other netizens routinely referred to each other by their online handles and nicks. And if you were at a Real Life, meatspace meetup, why wouldn’t you identify yourself with the name under which people knew you?

For a time, putting your e-mail address on your nametag had a kitschy cool to it, as did your Web page’s URL, though that got kind of unwieldy until more people started getting vanity domains.

But now that anyone who’s anyone in the field has their vanity domain, why are Twitter handles still  predominant? A few theories:

* They’re pretty recognizable. Put an @ in front of a word, and you know to put “twitter.com/” in front of it.

* It’s a shortcut — assuming you’re covering your social media basics, you’ve filled out your Twitter profile, or at the very least added the URL to your primary Web presence. So it’s a pointer to the rest of your “you.”

It’s a lot easier to say, “I’m [YOUR HANDLE] on Twitter”, than, say “I’m user # 3.14159 on Facebook,” and you can probably still claim your name or choice of nick on Twitter. (Act now.)

* It’s lazy — lazy in the sense that linking to a Wikipedia entry is lazy: You know that pointing to a Twitter profile page will communicate the basics of the person you’re writing about, and lead the reader to more info.

* It’s an invitation — especially given the inherently self-promotional, broadcast nature of Twitter, it’s a way to get your handle out there, and by doing so, invite people to follow you.

*  It’s still kind of cool. Flickr still has that tinge of shiny thing about it.

* Finally, and most importantly, it’s (dare I say it?) authentic. The thing about lifestreaming, is that it’s usually true. Or truthy, anyway. Sure, individual Tweets may be artfully contrived or deliberately outrageous, but if you take the long view of people’s twitterstreams, I think the banal, boring, nothing posts say a lot about a person. At the very least, you’re pointing people to who they’re trying to be, instead of what they’ve done.

Anyway, doubtlessly, Twitter will either fade, or become so insinuated into the fabric of communication that we won’t need to call it out on our nametags, and some next new thing will come along. Until then, I’ll still have my personal vanity domain to fall back on (which, in a happy, yet carefully-contrived happenstance, is the same as my Twitter handle.)

Do you find yourself identifying by your Twitter handle? If you don’t, what do you think of the people who do? Please leave a comment.

Dealing with lawyers (gosh bless ‘em) is enough to make any blogger a little oversensitive — even paranoid. But they exist for a good reason. When you remember that everything you say, write, or post online, has the potential to live forever, attached to your name, only a quick Web search away, the question isn’t “Are you paranoid?” but “Are you paranoid enough?” (Example: “Seriously, you have no privacy. Get over it.“)

Topical Tripwires: High-Risk, Low-Reward

When you’re blogging in support of your small business, you’ll probably want to stay away from the Big Three topics: Sex, politics, and religion. (Maybe sports, though depending on where you are, that may be a subset of any of the big three.)

This is not to say you should be an opinionless, humorless robot… it’s just that expressing opinions on divisive topics that have no relevance to your business is a high-risk, low-reward proposition. Don’t do it unless you’re really sure it’s appropriate to your business: If you’re a sex shop, talk sex. If you run an indie coffee shop and you cater to crunchy hippie types, you can probably talk your crunchy hippie politics. For everyone else, it all depends if you’re willing to live with the consequences. If you’re in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose your customers, go wild and talk about whatever you want.

This, of course, is not a new thing, it’s just that the Internet makes it easy to find the stuff you post on your personal time. When I lived in New York City, I used a roommate finding service (this was way, way before Craigslist). Later, a local newspaper revealed the fact that the proprietor, who seemed like a nice enough guy, was also a Holocaust denier. If I had known this beforehand, I would have taken my business elsewhere.

Anyway, all that stuff, while important, isn’t the reason I have trouble blogging sometimes. Staying away from topical tripwires that’ll get you in trouble is pretty easy, once you get the flavor of it.

I Support Cat Suffrage

The more insidious censorship is self-censorship. This is because it involves vanity: How is this going to make me look? It’s about positioning, and personal branding — what will people find when they search for me, and what will they think of me when they see it?

For example, say you search on my name, and on the same results page as my insightful, even trenchant, commentaries on social media, you see that in my personal blog postings, I also firmly believe that cats should have the right to vote. Will that change your opinion of me?

That’s a relatively benign example. The major risk is that your silly throwaway blog entries distract from the “important” blog entries that are more about what you’re about.

The point of all this is that, if you’re a good transparent and authentic small business blogger, you’re posting under your own name. And unless you set up an alter ego for your personal persona online that’s completely isolated from your business persona, there’s going to be some overlap between the stuff you post when you’re on the clock, and the stuff when you’re off the clock. And because there’s no disclaimer in the world that will fix this, invariably, this means you start edging towards always being on the clock.

Again, it’s probably always been this way — it’s just that the Internet puts your personal life on the same page as your professional one. I’m still struggling with this particular dilemma — I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

You will want to listen for awhile before responding. Look for trends & see where people are talking about your product/services. What is the tone? Are they pleased or not? It’s important to have a strategy in how you’re going to respond.

Here are a number of possibilities that you could encounter:

Reputation management – people are complaining about your brand. In responding to them, apologize & state how you will be improving the situation so that it doesn’t happen again. If this relies on other staff or improving your product, then follow thru on that.

Crisis - These need to be dealt with as soon as possible. If you can respond immediately before there are a number of other people agreeing with the author it’s much better for your brand.

Customer service – Provide the person with information on how to resolve their problem or contact your company to get assistance

Product development – Sometimes enthusiasts will review your product or service. Thank the person for their ideas for your product. If you decide to incorporate them, reach out to that person later & let them know of the new release. They will be thrilled & share that information with their readers. It’s the easiest way to generate word of mouth!

Compliments- You definitely need to graciously thank them!

You will also be able to find advocates for your brand. Talk with them by commenting on their posts & get involved. They will be pleasantly surprised!

Competitive knowledge – Monitoring conversations about the competitor is a good idea. You will learn a number of things. There may be opportunities for you to provide information about your products or services when people are asking for the competitor’s products. Practice good manners & remember that you’re in a social conversation. If you wouldn’t say it in real life in a social setting then it’s not a good idea to type it.

Further reading:

Why You Should Turn to Social Media During This Economic Crisis

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing by Chris Brogan

How do you get involved in the conversation? And please share examples of your successes & even failures so that others can learn from them.