Misc. Ramblings

5 Easy Ways to Build Your Digital Reputation
By Fauzia Burke,
President of FSB Associates

Social media has given us great ways to protect and build our digital reputations. Today we have the ease of searching conversations, the ability to set alerts to help us monitor our names, the constant availability of learning opportunities and more ways to communicate and interact with others. All of these tools, which were not available just a few years ago, now make it possible for us to be proactive in maintaining, building and protecting our good name. Here are five easy ways to do just that:

#1 Set Goals
I am sure you have done this already, but just in case, first do a search on Google for your name in quotation marks. It is important to see what comes up on the first page. The first page of a google search result is precious real-estate. Then set up a simple spreadsheet so you can keep track of your digital footprint. Do a little research and spend some time collecting numbers. How many Facebook followers do you have? What kind of traffic do you get on your site? Once you have the numbers you can then decide on your goals.

Are you interested in growing the numbers of links/connections/followers or do you want more one-on-one engagement? Or are you more interested in getting retweets on Twitter (which, as Guy Kawasaki said recently is "now the sincerest form of flattery"). Once the goals are in place, track the results in the spreadsheet and adjust as needed.

#2 Learn
To accomplish any of these goals, you are going to need to learn. The new world of communication is moving quickly, which naturally lends itself to a couple of advantages. First, there is a lot of room for experimentation, so use your talents and skills to communicate in your own unique way. Second, this experimentation has led to collaboration, and smart people are sharing information all the time. Make sure you make time every day for "learning." Look over sites and information to keep up with the developments in social media. Currently I am taking part in an online conference, called Social Media Success Summit 2010 and am learning a lot. And among the many sites I visit, one of my daily stops is: PR Daily News: Public Relations news and marketing in the age of social media.

#3 Develop Content
To communicate 24/7, which is now the expectation and the norm, you need to develop different types of content. Blogging is a great way to share your knowledge and collaborate with others. However, blogging can be a big undertaking. Blogging expert Denise Wakeman recommends that you blog 3 times a week. If that is a daunting task for you, try guest blogging on an established site or blog in your industry. Another way some of my clients have developed content is through books, ebooks, whitepapers, audio recordings, slide presentations and videos.

#4 Build Relationships
Building and maintaining relationships has never been easier. Those of us in sales and marketing have always known the value of relationship building, but now everyone needs to make it a priority. Make sure you have profiles on LinkedIn, and Facebook. Twitter is a fantastic source of information, and an excellent place to learn. People on Twitter are eager and happy to help each other. To get tips on effective communication on these sites, I look to Cindy Ratzlaff who has a daily video tip along with regular blog posts on her site. Social media is an excellent way to build relationships, but don't forget the value of face to face meetings, phone calls, hand written notes, and emails. It's good to focus on important clients and influencers, but leave room for the "accidental" connections. Social media networking can be serendipitous, you never know which person may lead you to a new connection or client.

#5 Monitor
Social media alerts (Google or Social Mention) are a great way to monitor your name and/or industry. If something important happens in your industry you'll know about it and can comment. If someone says something positive, a thank you goes a long way. If there is negative chatter starting up around your name or company, alerts keep you on top of it and you can jump in and take care of things quickly. I also use Addictomatic which is a great site for big picture monitoring.

There are many tools and resources now that can help us to become better communicators and better guardians of our reputations. I know it is a big undertaking, but the question to ask yourself is: If you are not investing in yourself, why should anyone else?

© 2010 Fauzia Burke

Author Bio
Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a web publicity and social media firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors. Founded in 1995, FSB's mission is to give authors an opportunity to promote their work to an eager, targeted audience online. FSB is based in the NYC area.  For web publicity and social media news, follow Fauzia on a new Twitter feed: @WebSnapshot, Facebook and The Huffington Post.

For more information please visit fsbassociates.com.

I decided it was time to finally watch the True Blood series, and I am glad that I have. Then I was approached by FSB Associates to review True Blood and Philosophy. I want to thank them for thinking of me and providing me with the book.

Though I am a big fan of the series, I honestly wasn't a big fan of of the book. I guess I wasn't expecting something so utterly philosophical and educational. It read too much like a text book and with me not being in college anymore, I really didn't want to think that hard on the series.

I can imagine this would be a good book to use in an actual philosophy course in college. It would be a relateable topic for the youth of today!

I'll give you an excerpt so you can see exactly where I am coming up with my opinion on this.

If I were offered to read any more of the Philosophy type books, I think I would have to turn it down and try something a little lighter, and in my specific pallet.


Here's an excpert:

TO TURN OR NOT TO TURN

The Ethics of Making Vampires

Christopher Robichaud

Lorena: What more can I give? What is it you want from me?
Bill: Choice

Sookie Stackhouse loves Bill Compton. And he loves her. The trouble is, Bill is a vampire and Sookie is human. Well, not quite, but she’s not immortal either.2 That means that as Sookie ages, Bill won’t. Let’s suppose that despite her fairy blood, Sookie can become a vampire. Would it be morally permissible for Bill to turn her into one? This question lies at the, um, heart of the issue we’ll be looking at in this chapter. The “unlife” of a vampire is often understood as something a person is condemned to. Many see Bill, for instance, as being damned to exist as a bloodthirsty creature of the night. Such an existence sure doesn’t sound like the kind of thing it would be nice to bestow on another. This is one of the reasons we’re tempted to say that Bill acted wrongly when he forced Jessica Hamby to abandon her normal life and replace it with an unlife of drinking blood—or at least, of drinking TruBlood—and shunning the daylight.

Bill and Sookie, Sitting in a Coffin, K-i-s-s-i-n-g

There’s an important difference between Jessica’s being turned into a vampire and the possibility of Sookie’s being turned into one. Jessica didn’t give Bill her permission, her consent. In fact, she was quite vocal in communicating just how much she did not want to become a vampire. In contrast, it’s likely that Sookie would be prepared to give her consent. (This may not be an entirely fair supposition, but it’s not absurd, either. After all, at the end of the second season of True Blood, she does decide to accept Bill’s marriage proposal.)3 This particular difference between Jessica and Sookie seems morally relevant. Whether it’s permissible for Bill to turn Sookie into a vampire—and, more generally, whether it’s permissible for vampires to turn the living into the undead—seems to hinge on consent. By this way of thinking, a vampire can turn a living person into an undead one only if the person to be turned has given consent.

So there appears to be a fairly straightforward answer to the question of whether Bill is permitted to turn Sookie into a vampire. He’s allowed to do so only if she gives him her consent. But like so much else in moral philosophy, this answer, even if correct, just scratches the surface of the issue.

Show Some Respect

Consent seems to be a necessary condition for the permissi- bility of Bill’s turning Sookie into a vampire. But can we say more than this? Absolutely. The importance of consent in determining how we’re allowed to treat others is a popular idea in moral philosophy and can be defended from several different perspectives. The one we’ll focus on comes from one of the most famous philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant presents a supreme moral principle, the categorical imperative, from which he thinks we can derive all of the more specific moral obligations that we have.4 Kant provides several different formulations of this principle, perhaps the most pop- ular one being the Formula of the End in Itself (also known as the Formula of Respect for Persons): “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

For Kant, we must treat persons this way—always as ends in themselves and never as mere means—because of their absolute, intrinsic value as agents who are capable of deliberating on their choices and setting their own goals. Our rational capacities are what make us distinct, claims Kant, and they ultimately ground the demands of morality. And so to respect the unconditional worth that all persons have as autonomous rational beings is to avoid using others to pursue our goals without their taking up those goals as their own. Let’s suppose Bill wants to turn Sookie into a vampire so that they can spend eternity together. That’s what Bill desires. And his desire leads him to adopt a goal: turn Sookie into a vampire. Now, it’s likely that Bill is capable of doing this without so much as broaching the topic with Sookie, as we see him do with Jessica. But if he went about it in this way, he’d be doing something morally impermissible because it would violate the categorical imperative. Bill would be treating Sookie as a mere means to achieving his goal of turning her into a vampire. He’d be treating her as a mere means because he didn’t allow her to take up his goal as her own—he didn’t give her the respect she’s owed as a rational person. To show Sookie proper respect, Bill would have to set aside his desire to turn her into a vampire until she consented to it.

According to this way of thinking, getting consent to perform certain actions is morally important because it’s how we avoid treating people as mere means; it allows us, in other words, to have our actions conform to the categorical imperative. This isn’t the only reason consent is important, but it’s a com- pelling reason that stems from an appealing moral principle— the categorical imperative—and that acquires its force from an equally appealing idea—that people should be respected because of the unconditional worth they possess.

~~~~~~

This book will be donated to the Hepburn Library in Colton, NY.

I must warn you now: DO NOT READ THIS WITHOUT B.O.B. OR YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER!

Now that we have that craziness out of the way, let me tell you what I thought about the book. Whew...


I knew this book was going to be high quality right from the beginning. The cover is HOT, the book is beautiful and is FILLED with tons of stories (OK, really only18) from Great authors.

I absolutely loved Clean and Pretty by Donna George Storey. I have read this story at least 3 times and one of those was out loud to my fiance. I'm not sure that he was as wowed as I was, but I don't think he has the same 'fantasies' that I have in this realm. I really enjoyed Jenny in this story, you could literally pull her tension and desire right off the pages and take them on yourself. You wanted what she wanted, you needed what she needed, and you were very satisfied when she finally gets what she deserves.


People in Glass Hotels  by Jennifer Peters....**sigh**. Though short in pages, it was NOT short in hottness and character. I wanted to be with her and her husband in Berlin to watch as her fantasy finally came to fruition. I would have loved to trade places with them as well. I will say that I wish I had just a little bit more insight into her husband's mind. Felix seemed like a guy that I would like to get to know a little better and I would have loved if Ms. Peters would have given me more. (But you know me, I want it ALL!)

We are all dirty minded folks if we allow ourselves to admit it, so when I read Busted by Kissa Starling I saw so much of what I would LOVE to do right there in front of me. You could tell that Ms. Starling has her finger on the pulse of people's wants, desires, and fantasies. Lydia and Andy instantly became people that I wanted to know, people that I wanted to hang out with on a regular basis! I enjoyed feeling every touch, every pulse, and snubbing my nose at the prudes. Wonderful read all around.

Here's a brief synopsis of the book:

Whether you love to watch a lover undress in person, relish peeking at the neighbors through a crack in their blinds, love to visit a strip club for a steamy show, or adore reversing the equation by taking center stage, Peep Show packs an erotic punch for voyeurs—and exhibitionists—of any stripe. These sexy stories speak to perhaps the most common sexual predilections: the wish to watch and be watched. While the appeal of a peep show—and of being peeped at—is well documented, rarely has the subject inspired an entire collection. This book corrals several unique stories, each of which explores a different facet of these desires, ensuring that any reader will be titillated.
I'd like to thank Ms. Bussel for the opportunity to review this wonderful book. This book will not be donated to my local library as it has an autograph and I am an autograph whore!