Facebook lovers out there may have noticed that when you logged into Facebook today you were prompted with a message that pretty much forced you to reevaluate your Facebook privacy settings.

So what hast Facebook done and how does it affect you? This is what it does according to them:

“Facebook’s new, simplified privacy settings give you more control over the information you share.”

Many of you probably remember the fiasco that took place about a year ago when Facebook changed their privacy policy and terms of service and everyone went crazy against the company.  The whole community was actively talking about moving off of the platform when they announced, through an update to their terms of service, that they owned all of the content that the users put on their system.

Since then Mark and the Facebook crew have been taking many more precautions to make sure that change like this goes as smoothly as possible.

Now if you are looking at these to help you protect your personal brand you have to consider the following:

• How visible do you want to be online?
• What do you currently use your Facebook account for?
• How much information are you comfortable disclosing to the world?

My suggestions are as follows:

• Only let people you know see your contact information such as email, phone number and most importantly address.
• Displaying work information to everyone may not be a bad choice as coworkers can find you and anyone that is interested in talking to the company can also find you.
• Photos – I would restrict these.  Many people don’t have photos on Facebook that they want an employer seeing.  Keep these personal as they are probably focused on your personal life.

A couple other changes and things you should note:

• You now have to enter a pass word when trying to edit your privacy settings (as if you aren’t already logged in).
• You can still set custom permissions for individuals or groups of people.
• They have a new user interface for editing the permissions of albums which is pretty slick.
• Preview my profile: take a moment to click on the preview my profile while you are in the privacy settings.  You can type in a person’s name to see how that person sees your profile.  It is a really great feature.

You want to make sure that you set your privacy settings at a level that you are comfortable with.  Always remember that displaying personal information to the world can be dangerous.  Privacy is of growing importance in today’s digital age and you don’t want to put yourself at risk in any way.

I am interested in hearing what others think about Facebook’s new approach to privacy settings.  Are these more or less confusing and how do you think privacy settings should be set?

Also – feel free to friend me on Facebook!  Look up RJ Sherman on Facebook.com and look for my shining face! I am part of the Syracuse and Brand-Yourself.Com network.

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The search giant has done it again.  We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the way we will interact with search.

The news around the web today is the Real Time Search functionality from Google.  For those of you who are getting on the boat late, which means 24 hours after it was launched, let me start off with a quick video that I came across that does a really good job of explaining what Google Real time search does.

So what does this mean?  This validates the importance of social media.  For all those of you out there that thought social media was a fad… check out the below video:

This means that the world has shifted its focus away from the idea that companies or blogs should be the source of information over to the idea that the people are the true source of information.  This should have a large impact on your personal branding efforts.

In order to get your name on the top of search results it is important be active in your social world and to engage your community so that others will continue to talk about you.  In the advent of Google Wave and now Social Search, Google has pointed out that real time information is the shift of the web.

It will be interesting to see what this changes in how Google treats older content on the web. What are you thoughts on Social Search as it relates to your personal brand? Do people see this add-on as useful or just more noise in and already noisy world?

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Many of you out there may have noticed that there was an upgrade to tweet deck today that enables you to do some cool new stuff with your twitter followers.  Here are two quick ways to use the new features to establish your personal brand and build stronger, more meaningful connections.

1) Connect with your most engaged followers on other platforms

When you think about twitter, too often people only think about connecting through one medium.  There is not enough overlap between your twitter followers, your connections on LinkedIn and your Facebook friends.  So first off I would suggest that you find the followers of yours that you really engage with and you connect with them on different platforms.  Tweet Deck enables you to connect with Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn seamlessly.

Remember that while technology makes it easy to connect with people that you may not have met, it is also in many ways an inefficient means cultivate meaningful, lasting connections.  For that reason you want to build multiple forms of communication between your virtual friends.

2) Turn twitter connections into “real-world” connections

The next monumental shift that is coming along is the ability to meet your virtual world.  Now I am not talking about Second Life or anything like that, I am talking about actually shaking a person’s hand.

You should not only focus on individuals in your industry when you are building your followers, you should look to the locals.  There has been a recent explosion on twitter of people trying to connect with others in their area.  It is always interesting to meet someone for the first time after you have communicated online.  This meet up solidifies the relationship.

If you want to start building a more meaningful relationship today, fire up the newest version of Tweet Deck and start looking for your followers geolocation information and see where your friends are congregating.  Look for local twitter lists and get involved locally to help build your personal brand in your area.

I am interested in hearing what other people are doing on twitter and in Tweet Deck that is different to connect with people.

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I have been talking for the past few weeks about how to get your name to the top of Google and how to seo your site to help you be found.

Instead of spending this week with another week giving our readers another step by step guide I want to show you an example an SEO’d site to point out some good and not so good.

Let’s start with our friend Dan Schawbel, he runs the Personal Branding Blog. Now, if you have taken the time to look at his site you will notice that on the home page he uses the words “Personal Branding” 22 times in visible text and a total of 125 times in Reference tags.  And no, for those of you wondering I did not count, I used this really good tool to check the keyword density of the page: http://www.keyworddensity.com/

What does this mean?  It means that if you were to read his site you would see the words “Personal Branding” 22 times and that he has optimized all of his backend content for that keyword phrase as well.  This is the reason that he comes up number 1 for the phrase and that his personal site comes up number two.

So why else does he come up so highly?  There are a couple of really important factors that should be noted.  First off, according to website grader (which scores him as a 99.5) he has over 11,000 inbound links.  This means that in Google’s eyes he has 11,000 votes towards his site being credible.  Always remember that inbound links are one of the most important factors for search engines to determine how reputable a site is.

Some of the other big things that Dan has working in his favor are:

• Publishes content on a daily basis – Search engines want to see content that is fresh, that doesn’t mean rewrite your home page every day but that does mean that you should be adding pages/posts regularly.
• Dan has good content – it is not that he is publishing the same old stuff every day; he is taking the time to put together good articles that are always focused on personal branding.  Search engines want good content for their readers.

What could Dan do better?

• Extend how long he owns the domain name- Currently (according to website grader) the domain name is only registered for another year.  Search engines want to make sure that the domain name is not new so it is good that he has owned it for almost 3 years, but they also want to see that you plan to use it moving forwards
• Leverage Digg – make sure that all of his articles are automatically submitted to Digg so that users are more apt to click on them and it makes it easier for a passive user to Digg his articles.  Social networks are playing a larger part in today’s SEO world.  Dan does effectively get his content out to many of these networks, but it is important to not let any of them slide.
• I would look to see if there is a way to do a 301/302 redirect of his old blog that he used to run through wordpress- Or at least i would start going through that site and creating links on the word personal branding to his current site.  He has not been able to overcome it at the top of Google and a linking strategy could help take away some of the Page Rank from his old site.

Dan’s site is a great example of how to do site wide search engine optimization.  He has done it very well there is no doubt there.  It is a complex process that enables you to go for higher traffic words than you can sometimes achieve with only writing a series of articles about one topic.  Also keep in mind, larger sites such as CNN and the NYTimes can more easily get harder keywords due to their higher page rank.

Next week I am going to focus my efforts on giving you insight into another important case study, a look at a single page SEO strategy and pointing out the pros and cons.  Thanks and I look forward to your questions / comments!

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