Breaking the Golden Rule

Breaking the Golden Rule

Broken Rules by MoriEndi.

“I like to hear a man talk about himself because then I never hear anything, but good. Will Rogers 

Over on the excellent Cambridge Cluster blog, Philip has written about what I’m up to.  In it he says;

“With a quick search, I found three sites: Oli Barrett home page, The Daily Networker and Battlefront.  He seems to break the golden rule of the Internet by spreading himself around so Google does not know where to find him.”

It got me thinking about this (and another) Golden Rule, so I’m hoping you won’t mind if I share a few thoughts:

I have one main blog at www.DailyNetworker.co.uk. Each time I hit ‘publish’,it is automatically sent to the front page of my personal site and to my Battlefront mentor page (I suppose the reason for this is that ‘bios’ can be quite static and I like the idea that a new visitor can see what I’ve been writing about just a few days ago).

The only recent exception to this is where I have been blogging for Global Entrepreneurship Week, where I had to copy and paste the blogs back over to Daily Networker (I didn’t want to be blogging on Unleashing Ideas without sharing the benefit with my main blog readers, many of whom are friends.)

Also, each time I publish on Daily Networker, a ‘note’ is automatically created in Facebook.

So that might be why the three sites mentioned in the piece make it seem like I have three blogs – in fact it’s syndication on a mini scale to the other areas of my life!

In terms of breaking the internet’s golden rule (by spreading myself around)…that’s also got me thinking. One (possible?) positive is that, currently, the first thing Google returns is my personal site. I like this because it has a contact form on it, which brings in some amazing opportunities and interesting people. In the overall scheme, I think that Google makes it EASY to find me, not difficult (for better or worse!).

Finally, I wonder to what extent I also break one of work’s ‘golden rules’ by having more than one ‘job’, or having more than one source of income? Ignoring this rule eventually means that you have to have a presence in several places I suppose. Or does it?

Social media fascinates me – I’ve been experimenting with how to connect with more people in a smarter way (hence the syndication stuff, and a new column in Growing Business) – I also want to be easy for people to find if they need to, as I hope this will lead to being offered increasingly interesting opportunities as time goes by.

The truth is that I’m doing my best to experiment with all of this as I go along, and I’m sure that there are a million things I ought to be doing smarter and better.  All pointers gratefully received!

“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules” George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

5 Replies to “Breaking the Golden Rule”

  1. Hi Oli, in all of my years working with the web I’ve never heard of this ‘golden rule’ of the Internet. I think that a good ‘web presence’ for a person or an organisation should be like tentacles, reaching into whichever corners of the web that are relevent to you or people who are interested in you. So based on this I reckon you’re doing well: You’re making use of existing networks like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, and you have your own hubs that help to connect the dots. Keep on going with this, you’re doing it right!

  2. Cross-site syndication is definitely a good thing. The SSE blog gets adapted and picked up in a rich variety of places, posted to Facebook and so forth. We also use del.icio.us as part of our main website, and other tools as standard (Flickr, Facebook groups etc). Oh yeah, and commenting on blogs can help too :0)

    Finally: the other golden rule; always check your links work. I think BattleFront one has a glitch…..

    Cheers

  3. Great feedback. I guess that there is a difference between having one career and having a portfolio lifestyle where you might be wishing to send out different messages. Got me thinking so thanks.

  4. I think it’s fair to say, there’s two schools of thought – those that think you should manage your identity in one place, and those who say you should be everywhere (guess which approach goes the way of the dinosaur?)
    In today’s world, we want to be able to express our different facets, to the different communities we engage with..

    Eventually, we’re going to fragment ourselves out, across different platforms, and different sites, until we start to have tools that help weave them back together again.

    But in order to learn to use all the media effectively, just keep doing more of what you’re doing – you’ll end up learning as you go 🙂
    Cheers
    Farhan

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