Years ago when I named my blog Digital Papercuts, I didn’t really think about it as a brand. When I joined Twitter two years ago, the ideas of social media authenticity and online identities were still based on anonymity, so I did not use my real name. My profile is @dgtlpapercuts, based on my blog name. Well, today I discovered a Twitter conversation that used my online identity, my brand as a noun. That means I made it, right?

From Marketing Voices:

The legendary Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author and Twitter aficionado talks about the strategies he uses for gaining incredible numbers of people following him on twitter. More than 180,000 people are reading his tweets as of October 2009. He talks about how there is no correct or incorrect way to use Twitter despite the challenging criticisms he gets from his followers on his strategy. He uses Twitter mostly promotionally just to build Alltop, a company he co-founded and loves dearly. Guy talks about how he is a broadcast network—more like PBS– as he educates his readers with his content-rich tweets. He uses ghost writers and discusses his transparency and tricks-of-the-trade.

If you are part of the social media world, and especially the Twitterverse, you know that Twitter recently added a list feature so Twitter users can now organize the people they follow into smaller, more manageable groups and view their timelines together. While this makes Twitter more usable for users who are following a lot of people, it also provides a bit of insight into what people think of you, or in this case me.

As of this moment, I am on 58 lists. That seems like a large number, but not really when it is compared to the 2128 people who follow me. Does that mean that 2070 who follow me and didn’t put me on a list don’t care about my tweets? I wouldn’t go that far, but I am sure some of them don’t. I am more interested in what the people who took the time to put me on a list think of me. I’ve divided the lists into categories below and have examples of the list names.

Professional Lists (34%)
These people are interested in viewing my Twitter stream along with others tweeting about B2B, marketing or social media.
b2b-marketers
b2b-thinkers
social-media
social-media-b2b
marketing-tweeps
marcomm-advertising
industry-professionals

Local Area (34%)
The next category is of people who have grouped me with others in the Triangle region of central North Carolina
nc-neighbors
triangle-nc
raleigh
raleigh-durham
triangle-tweeple

Event Speakers (12%)
I have spoken at several recent events and a few people have categorized me related to those events.
speakers
socialfresh
smbf

A Lonely Category
Only one person has categorized me as a photographer. This is not surprising as I don’t tweet about photography or share my real photos that much. Mobile phones have made everyone an online photographer.
photographers

Huh?
These three people created lists that I don’t understand. I do know all of them, but am a bit boggled by the names. Teneighty? Information? What else are you getting on Twitter? And blinkers? All of this person’s lists rhyme, but I don’t know what it means.
teneighty
information
blinkers

It Could Go to My Head
I am both humbled and jazzed to be on the following lists. They show that I have made a real impact on people and they value my thoughts, opinions, and even friendship. Thanks. You guys are very cool.
smart-people
rockstars
thoughtleaders
smartncooltweeps
top-b2b-influentials
a-list
friends
worlddomination

What is the best list that you are on?

In yesterday’s soccer game, my son Peter scored three goals. It was the second game of the season and his team lost 4-3. The impressive thing about this, as a proud soccer dad, is that he has not played organized soccer in 5 years. Soccer was his first organized sport at 4, and I was one of his coaches. He developed a love for football, and started playing when he was old enough (seven). Now that he has discovered he is more interested in watching football than getting pummeled in football, he’s back to soccer. And at the rec league level so he doesn’t humiliate himself. His words, not mine.

As a social media guy, I am armed with my iphone, ready to share his accomplishments with my online friends and followers. Who knew it would turn into a blog post about ways to share photos and updates? But isn’t everything in my life fodder for a blog post?

So the first thing I do when I arrive at a new place is to checkin on Brightkite. This way if I post any photos, they will be tagged to a location and distributed to my selected networks.

After Peter scored his goal, which was done at the far end of the field, he came out of the game and got some water. I took his picture with my iphone and posted it to Brightkite. Here’s how it shows up on the location-based service. And there is a place for people to leave comments. I have Brightkite set to post notes and photos to Twitter as well.

Here’s the post to Twitter, which includes a link back to Brightkite and an indication that this is a photo.

After he scored his second goal, again at the far end, I took a picture when he came out again to get some water. I asked him to raise his hands in celebration. He humored me. Since I take photos using the camera function of iphone, rather than within any application, I can take multiple shots and choose the best one, and even change how I want to share it. For this second photo, I chose to post it to Posterous. This site allows you to post by email, which is super easy. This is now my preferred method of posting photos, as it can function as a photo blog for my mobile photos, although you can post anything there. Here’s the photo. Again, a place for comments, and again it posts to Twitter.

Here’s the post on Twitter with a link back to Posterous.

When Peter scored his third goal, I did not have a picture to post, so I just sent an update to Twitter.

Additionally, when I post photos to either Brightkite or Posterous, I have them set to also post the photos to Flickr, my main online photo repository.

And, I have all Twitter posts set to update my Facebook status as well.

And finally, FriendFeed is set up to aggregate all my content, so this is what that looks like. Since my Posterous site is new, I need to link that here too.

So that’s one way the flow of sharing information that works for me. There are lots of other flows and connections as most sites can be integrated to others. My two comments are that you don’t want to overload people and connect everything to everything as that can create duplicate content, and don’t post updates to places where you never go and interact with people. You need to respond to comments or updates about your own updates.

Let me know if you have any questions, and happy sharing.

Join us on Thursday, Oct. 22 at the first Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup at the N.C. State Fair. The event will be held in the Folk Festival Tent from 7 to 9 p.m. on Food Lion Hunger Relief Day. Bring four cans of food for Free entry to the fair. Register here for free for the Deep Fried Triangle Tweetup.

This past week was Triangle Tech Week (search #tritech), where we had social media or technology events every day this week in the Triangle region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) of North Carolina. It was a long week, and considering that me and my OurHashtag partners planned several of them, I have been resting and recovering today. The following tweet from @theRab lists all the events. He worked very hard to get six events listed in 140 characters. He was very proud of the tweet and other retweeted it.

Monday: Triangle Tweetup

While the last Triangle Tweetup (search #triangletweetup) had over 250 people, we had a “flash” Triangle Tweetup to kick off the week at Edge Office in Glenwood South in Downtown Raleigh. We announced it Monday morning.

We started by congratulating Jazzy Chad on his new gig with Twitter. Don’t worry, he’s staying in Raleigh, and will be helping them out part-time. According to this blog post, Chad was such an integral part of the Twitter community in both his creation of Tweetgrid and his customer support, that Twitter took notice.

We talked about the use of professional tools for Twitter. We discussed the features and benefits of CoTweet, HootSuite, TweetGrid and Seismic. We talked about how these different tools allow organizations to manage incoming and outgoing tweets for customer service, and how to implement that into a business workflow.

Tuesday: Westend Tweetup

On Tuesday, we gathered at Carrboro Creative Coworking for the first Westend Tweetup (search #westendtweetup). This gathering of Chapel Hill/Carrboro Twitter users and those looking to learn more about Twitter was organized by Greg deLima. Wayne Sutton led a discussion based on a Twitter presentation he gave 2 years ago. It was interesting to see that much about the Twitter world had not changed. An awful lot of the infrastructure of the platform and core users were in place at that time. Sure, some logos had changed, many more tools are available to interface with Twitter, but the principles of building a following and engaging have not changed.

Wednesday: Ignite Raleigh

Our big event for the week was Ignite Raleigh, and we had approximately 500 people join us at the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Raleigh. Ignite events happen all over the world and they are about sharing ideas in a simple format. The tag line is “Enlighten us, but make it quick.” Each presenter gets 5 minutes and 20 slides to share their ideas. And the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. 10 speakers were chosen by the community through an open voting process, and 5 speakers were selected by the organizers. We asked Zach Ward of DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro to MC, and he did a fabulous job.

The event also included internet comic musicians Rhett and Link and DJ Rosseau spinning tunes throughout the event.

The Carolina Rollergirls helped us out by introducing the sponsor commercials and announcing the door prize winners. They did not skate around, but they did chase a few people around.

Here is a link to the presenters and their presentations, and here’s a link to the list of blog posts and other online coverage of the event. As organizers, there are certainly some things we could have done better, as there always are, but overall the event was a great success. Everyone seemed leave entertained, inspired and in an upbeat mood. Sounds like a success to me. We are already planning the next Ignite.

Thursday: Triangle Social Media Club

Photo by Wayne Sutton

On Thursday we hosted a Triangle Social Club at iContact in Durham which featured a demo of Google Wave by Jay Cuthrell. Jay attended the Google Wave announcement event and has been using the Dev Preview of Google’s new development platform that will bring email, documents and collaboration together. An ongoing thread or conversation is called a wave, and new information is tracked as it is added to the wave, so someone can view later everything that was contributed in the order it was added. We also heard about bots that can be added to waves with stupid names like spelly and linky. There are also annoying bots that convert a wave to pirate speak or show everything in comic speech balloons. Here’s Jay’s presentation, but the real interest of the meeting was in seeing wave in action.

Friday: BarcampRDU Pre-party

The night before BarcampRDU there is a traditional gathering for beer. This year was no exception and it occurred at Raleigh’s Flying Saucer.

Saturday: BarcampRDU

This was my first year attending BarcampRDU. My schedule had never worked out previously, but I also always thought it was too technical. There was a big development crowd there, but I attended sessions on marketing, startups, Google Wave (presented by a guy from Google who is based in Chapel Hill), and a Geek Dad one. I also lead a session titled “Potpourri for $500,” which I will discuss in a separate post. A big shoutout to Dave Johnson and all the other organizers and volunteers for a great unconference.

The crowd learning about Google Wave

The session grid

The last men standing. Wayne and I were the only ones who attended all 6 events of Triangle Tech Week and we were exhausted. If anyone else had joined us at all 6 events and appeared in this photo, they would have received a prize. Since we would be the ones presenting the prize, we did not bother giving it to ourselves.

If you attended any of the events of Triangle Tech Week, or even just followed them online, we hope you met some new people, learned some new things and were inspired by the community here in North Carolina’s Triangle.

In the old days, like back in 2007, birthdays came and went with little online fanfare. Sure, you got phone calls and voice mails that needed to be returned. You might even have gotten some email birthday wishes that needed to be replied to. But the main celebration revolved around real life friends and getting together.

Today, and in fact, it really is today for me, you must monitor your large social networks for birthday wishes. I am connected with many more people online than I would see in person on my birthday. In my case it started with Facebook messages yesterday, and continuing with many more today. I also received messages on Twitter from friends and bots. And it is my responsibility to keep up with the messages all day long and thank each and every person for their wishes. They are truly appreciated.

Almost 2 years ago I signed up for Twitter and needed a picture for my avatar. I took the picture on the left, made it black and white, cropped it and went with it. I am not a huge fan of posed pictures, and when people smile in pictures I prefer it to be natural, rather than posed. So I used a picture where I was not smiling. It was fine at the time. I did not want to be smiling.

As I joined other social networks, I used the same picture. I understand branding and this picture was part of my personal brand I was building. My twitter name and many other profiles referred back to the name of this site, Digital Papercuts. Twitter did not let me have enough characters, and I actually delayed joining Twitter for about 3 months until I was happy with my abbreviated username, @dgtlpapercuts. Friends still struggle to spell it after all this time. What letters are left out, they would ask for the umpteenth time.

Time went on and this picture became more and more ingrained as my personal identity. As other people who knew me joined my online communities, they would comment on the picture. You look so serious, they would say. But it was my personal brand and I was unwilling to change it. The best comment I ever received about my avatar was via Twitter. I was speaking at a Triangle Tweetup event and someone tweeted, “@dgtlpapercuts is not as badass in person as his Twitter avatar.”

And not only did I never change pictures, I never decorated my avatar either. I never wore a Santa hat or a red nose, and I never turned it green.

It became such a brand statement that I even put the picture on my business card. There is nothing more cheesy to me than a picture on a business card. But every time I was ready to revise the card and remove the picture, someone would remark upon receiving my business card, Oh I know who you are from Twitter. It meant I had succeeded in creating a personal brand that people recognized.

Well, recently I have heard the rumblings about my avatar. Why aren’t you smiling? It’s not a good picture of you. You should take a new picture. You look so serious. Want me to take a new picture of you?

Last week I did a survey of my followers, asking if they were smiling in their avatars. The response, although small, was convincing. People smile in their avatars because they are happy. People would rather engage with a smiling, happy person, even over the internet. The social aspect of social networking overwhelms everything else and many people eschew the traditional business portrait look in their avatar.

I interviewed my friend and business partner, Wayne Sutton, last week and asked him the smiling avatar question. He is not smiling, but he is trying to create a professional impression after transitioning from a caricature avatar.

I took a new picture where I am smiling. Since I take a picture of myself every day, I take lots of different kinds of pictures. Sometimes I even smile. I made it black and white for consistency, but I did not crop it as tightly as the old picture. For the time being I am only changing my Twitter avatar and background, so I can get used to the new look. If this new photo seems to work, and resonate with my followers, I will begin to change the picture on my other social networks.

And if major brands can change their logo, I can change mine too. Let me know what you think of this change in the comments. And let me know if you change your avatar frequently, occasionally or never.

I talked to Wayne Sutton, social media strategist, about how he manages his Twitter followers, his multiple Twitter accounts and why he’s not smiling in his Twitter avatar. Wayne is everywhere online, and his links can be found at wayne-sutton.com. Follow Wayne on Twitter at @waynesutton.

Tonight I went shopping with my 8 year old daughter and she was playing with my iphone. She is recently enamored with a bubble wrap game. She has mastered it and has knocked my high score out of the high scorers. Every few games, the app shows a promo ad that offers prizes if you play the pro version.

Grace read me the ad and said that it is only 99 cents.

I told her that I don’t pay for apps.

“You paid for the Twitter app.”