Should you stick to the one image? And what’s the best kind of image to use?

Seth Godin gave some timely tips on avatars on his blog post on avatars recently. His ten points can be summed as:

Keep it simple
Keep it professional
Happy is more important than beautiful

Seth’s guide is easy and intelligent.

But there is room to make your avatar fun and distinctive if you wish. Australian social media commentator, Laurel Papworth, has a purple-haired illustration with a rather stern expression for an avatar.
It works for her!

How to choose your Twitter avatar

Twitter is fast and ‘noisy’. Your profile image should easily and strongly identify you. A blurred or indistinct image won’t do you any favours, and neither will changing your image frequently.

If you’re branding a business, your logo is a good choice of avatar (although it’s not as friendly as a photo!)

If you want to use your logo, make sure it’s clear. If using your whole logo results in tiny illegible text or images that you need a microscope to see – crop a distinctive part of your logo and use that.

A comprehensive guide to choosing an avatar: – Twitter Avatars – Choosing a brilliant one (Malcolm Coles) Malcolm has used lots of avatar photos and designs to show you what he thinks makes a great avatar.

Should you stick to the exact same avatar right across the board?

If you’re running a business, and you’re trying to brand yourself as the face of your business, is the best thing to stick with the one image of yourself? Probably.

If you’re using certain social media mostly to catch up with friends and family, changing your avatar or profile photo is fine. For example, your Facebook friends and family love it when you change your photo– it makes them feel a part of the changes in your life.

The avatars in the image at the top of this page were created with http://illustmaker.abi-station.com. This program allows you to create many thousands of different looks, including the ability to align any feature.

The most amazing aspect is the ease at which anyone can publish material. An individual can publish cheaply (even for free), instantly and to a wide audience– possibly a worldwide audience.

Wikipedia says:

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content.

A school student can create their own blog or website, publishing content to a mass audience, and gaining feedback on that content. People can distribute and share articles and news stories. Before the World Wide Web happened, there were huge obstacles to publishing to a wide audience. The options of television, print media (newspapers and magazines) and radio can involve huge obstacles– such as the costs, access to printing machinery, and so on.

How we communicate online

In the online world, we can communicate via email, discussion forums, support forums, blogs, chat, news groups, business networks, feeds, podcasts, video, social shopping websites, virtual worlds and a massive variety of social media websites. Twitter, Facebook and Digg are examples of well-known social media sites.

Social media can include user-generated content (UGC)– which is the members of a website creating content through posts, videos, comments, photos, reviews and other material. This is in stark contrast to traditional media (TV, print media, radio) where the material is presented to consumers.

To gain a quick snapshot of some of the sites out there, take a look at the share/ bar at the bottom of this post (mouse over it, and then click the little down button at the bottom)
StumbleUpon, Furl, SiteULike, Yahoo Buzz, ShoutWire, Xerpi, Wink, Mixx, Bebo, Diigo… are just a few. And there are more coming all the time.

Social media burnout

It’s enough to make your throw your hands up in the air and say, “I can’t keep up with all of that!”
Which brings us to another common term– social media burnout. People who conduct business online can especially feel the effects of social media burnout– to gain exposure for your business can mean exhausting hours trying to maintain a presence across a variety of different social networking mediums. A better option could be to choose the online networking media you actually enjoy, and pay a public relations expert to take you the rest of the way.

Social media is swiftly evolving, and there are many more losers than winners when it comes to social media startups. Creating a website that captures the imaginations of web users and allows them to communicate effectively and easily is a task that many entrepreneurs and programmers strive for.

Your unique username in social media

If you’d like to check if your username is available across the most popular social media websites, knowem.com offers a program where you can type in your username (or desired username) and see if it has already been registered. knowem.com “…..checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.”

The image at the top of this page shows the know em? website.