Online networking

Today I subscribed to Twitter. I was against it for a while, but I realised it could be a good opportunity to 'stay in touch' with thing that interest me. I have a Myspace profile. I have a Youtube profile. I have a Facebook profile. I have a website. I have all sorts of online network profiles and my average profileview is 3. That's oke though, since I don't have any music up or anything else that might be interesting for visiters.

How do you guys manage your online networking? How do you use Twitter for promoting your music for instance? Do you make a twit that linkes to you website? And how did you find followers? And does your online networking help you in any way? Did you meet interesing people in the sence that they could help you in your musical-bussiness endeavors?

You don't have to answer all of the above questions. I'm just curious in what way you use and organise your network profiles and what it has brought you so far.

I'm interested in this too as I'm wondering what I would do with a twitter profile/how to manage it.

I think my friend found out that you could follow 200 ppl in order to have them follow you back before twitter gets wise that you're up to something. So, start following ppl ;)

-John

I have a twitter- and a FB account, linked. That way it is easier to manage, since I have only one thing to post. I do not use it specificly for promoting music. Its more of a general place where I can speak my mind, which happens to be about music a lot ;)

I don't care about followers so much, its for family, people far away to stay in touch. With some YC composers I have talked a lot through FB, posts and chat.

So, my 2 cents

How did you go about linking them?

What I did is: I put a link to a folder with my works on box.net on my FB page, I had myspace, but that thing just died since FB became so popular so I don't go there anymore. I also promote my new pieces with a link on my status on FB, msn etc... I hang in lots of groups conected to music, and I did indeed meet a lot of interesting people with whom I can collaborate. I'm currently in a phase of doing a decent demo-reel and developing a website so all of that will also get linked together. One thing that I'm thinking of is that I see a lot of people visiting youtube vids of popular song covers on piano, guitar, violin or what have you... and I see that a lot of those musicians have a couple of covers up on youtube and then their own works and links to their websites etc... I noticed people genuinely becoming interested in works of a particular musicians who's cover of their favorite song they watched. I'm thinking that might be a good way to promote yourself on youtube.

Okay, time for my not-so-brief rundown of social networking for music professionals:

Website:

The one thing you absolutely must without a doubt have is your own personal website. It's all well and good to have a million social networking tentacles, but if you don't have a body to attach them to and have them lead to/sprout from then you're not really putting out any sort of consistent image. So step one is definitely have your own site. Preferably buy your own domain (so that you're www.putridmarmoset.com instead of www.putridmarmoset.blogspot/wordpress/tumblr/etc.com) and get a good hosting plan (I recommend Dreamhost). Once you have a good hosting plan and a domain, WordPress makes it really easy (and free) to work from a template to create a sleek, efficient, and compatible design that is easy to customize and maintain. SquareSpace is beautiful but expensive. Be wary of things like Wix — they seem nice, but their service/hosting plans are idiotic, and the fact that they're Flash-based and building-block oriented makes them terribly inefficient and distractingly overwrought.

Everything Else:

Once you have a central hub (your site) where all important information, pieces, credentials, etc are clearly laid out, THEN you can worry about having profiles on your favourite social networks — but the aim is to get people to visit your site, which is where all the information is. In terms of which networks you need to be on...none, really. It depends on your free time and your needs. Each profile you create means extra maintenance/update time, even if you link several together. Twitter is big and is a nice way to get a bunch of quick info and tidbits out to a big audience...once you get followers. Facebook is for friends. LinkedIn is the must-have professional profile. MySpace should die in a hole, drowning in the tears of broken dreams.

Most social networking sites nowadays will allow you to link status updates...so for instance every time you update your Facebook status, it gets pushed to Twitter as well as a new tweet, and LinkedIn takes the new tweet and sets it as your status update on there too. That way, you only need to do the updating once. You can also check out online services or standalone programs like Socialite that help you keep on top of multiple social networking accounts. Remember that you want to be as efficient as possible with this...if you're spending two hours each day updating and screwing with your social networking, then it's more of a distraction than a help. Keep it lean and keep it working for you.

YouTube is a great way to get your music out to a huge audience. Best idea: put together a demo reel video that showcases your best music. Try to use interesting accompanying visuals and keep the whole thing fairly short. Make sure there are clear links to your website (remember, it's the centre of your online presence), and that no one could possibly have any trouble figuring out who you are, what you do, and where they can hear more. I wouldn't use YouTube as my host for all demo material. It's just inefficient. But having a reel on there is a good idea.

Having a blog is another smart idea. Nice place to share all major news in more words than Twitter would allow for and with more elaborate formatting and content than Facebook would. WordPress is not only a blogging engine, as most people believe, it's a fully featured website architecture...but if your site is powered by WordPress then obviously you can easily integrate a great blog on your website. Alternatives if you don't use WordPress but need a blog include Tumblr, TypePad, Expression Engine, and Blogger. Personally, I think Blogger is pretty disgusting, have no qualms with TypePad, like the look but not the usability of EE, and I use and love Tumblr for its gorgeous looks and extensive customization options.

You're already social networking...right here! This forum, and any others you're on, are an opportunity to meet like-minded people, advertise your services (if an appropriate section for such things exists), and learn things. Don't forget that.

Usefulness:

How useful social networking is professionally depends a lot on how good you are at it. There's an art to good social networking, and it's about treating your fans/followers/etc with respect and recognizing that — professionally speaking — they aren't likely to give a scraggy what you had for breakfast. If you have a professional profile, keep the tweets on topic. Random, funny, sure — but if you want people to keep following you then give them interesting information. Useful tips are great. Show them new music. Tell them how you did it. Let them know what you're working on. Ask them questions! Basically interact with them directly and levelly. If you really feel the need to let people know about your breakfast, consider opening a second Twitter/whatever profile that's personal and is intended for your creepy-donkey friends who need to be able to stalk your day-to-day activities in the minutiae of details you feel is necessary to provide.

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Useful services that are not social networking sites per se, but which I have found vital:

SoundCloud: beautiful player, extensive and generous hosting plans, extensive statistics, and easy shareability (via widgets, short links, etc). An excellent choice for hosting your music.

DropBox: Brilliant system for managing, maintaining, and delivering files across multiple computers. Currently I'm testing it as the primary delivery system for all my professional submissions and it's quickly becoming invaluable.

Box.net: Another decent service for hosting and displaying files online. Has a player for audio files but is not specialized in audio hosting and promotion like SoundCloud is.

BandCamp: The best online service I'm aware of for selling your music on YOUR terms. No service fees, you set your prices, and you can sell audio in multiple formats (Mp3, Lossless FLAC, etc)

Scribd: Does for documents what SoundCloud does for audio. Need to host your resume somewhere so you can embed it live on your site and not force people to download things if they don't want to? Scribd is your new friend.

Bit.ly: One of the oldest and best link shortening services.

PayPal: The best and most ubiquitous online payment system. An international freelancer's dream system.

Wufoo: Extremely versatile and powerful online system for making, distributing, and maintaining forms, surveys, etc.

Gist: Ridiculously thorough but genius system for managing all your contacts from all your social networks, email accounts, and other online presences. Takes a while to set it up, but it's really useful once you do.

So that you can see all this in action and so that I can use it as an excuse to promote my site a bit (you see what I'm doing here — take notes!), I'll walk you through my own implementation of all the things I've just outlined by using my website as an example:

www.mathazzar.com

Things I've done:

• Right off the bat, you see my logo (yay branding) and subtitle (Composer for Media — clear establishment of what I do)
• Underneath that is the navigation, which we'll get to, and below that is a customized Soundcloud player displaying my Demo Reel
• Underneath that, big icons linking to my major social networking presences (feel free to follow/add me, by the way, I'll be happy to reciprocate)
• I have a personal Facebook acount and a page that I update and have fans on for my professional work — updates to the page automatically get sent to Twitter
• My portfolio page needs a bit of a facelift, but basically it has my work organized by project — fresher ones using SoundCloud, older ones using my old Flash player
• About Me is clear and self-explanatory — who I am and why you should care
• The Journal redirects you to my Tumblr page, which is what I use to handle my blogging. All my news goes there and, of course, Tumblr can optionally update my Twitter too with each new post (automatically shortening the link)
• The Resume page uses Scribd to display my resume for all to see/print/save without forcing them to download anything if they don't want to
• Contact page has a form (built through Wufoo) that lets people contact me without needing to open their email programs, and all my other major contact information is there
• Right at the bottom is a donation button where friendly folks can send me money via PayPal if they so choose (*cough*).

• Integrate the look of my new personal site (www.mariusmasalar.com) with my professional site (www.mathazzar.com)
• Make a video reel of my music work for my YouTube profile
• Make a custom background for my Twitter profile page
• Prettify my professional website's Portfolio page

Wrap-Up:

And that just about sums it up. It's a long post, but it's actually a fairly brief rundown of my thoughts on social networking. To close, I'll say that to me it's been very valuable — I've met colleagues, gotten jobs, and had an easier time staying in touch with clients and friends than I would have otherwise. Rules of thumb for social networking: make it work for you, don't let it dominate your schedule and impede your work by distracting you. Also, make sure you're easy to get a hold of for prospective clients. I understand that having multiple secret aliases protects you from having the big bad internet people come rape you in your sleep, but if you want to be known, recognized, and contacted then it helps to be at least moderately open about your identity.

That's all for now. As with everything, the above is just a set of opinions and may not apply to everyone. Think and adapt it for your particular circumstances. Still, I hope it's helpful to those who can make some use of the knowledge! :happy:

Okay, time for my not-so-brief rundown of social networking for music professionals:

[...]

That's all for now. As with everything, the above is just a set of opinions and may not apply to everyone. Think and adapt it for your particular circumstances. Still, I hope it's helpful to those who can make some use of the knowledge! :happy:

Thanks a lot Marius. This is very helpful.

Marius, you just posted in a tight little nutshell what I've been trying to figure out for years!!!!!!!!! You are an absolute prince!

I'm not particularly graphically-minded to begin with, and I don't really understand what goes into building a website, so I've been at a loss as to how to begin the process of building my own, let alone who to host it and what to build it with. I have a feeling once I start looking into your suggestions, this info will prove invaluable to me, and I'm grateful!

Thanks for sharing your seemingly fathomless knowledge once again. :D

My pleasure, guys! Lee, definitely look into the sites and services above, and if you need any other help with it then shoot me an email and I'll help you get up and running. :)

Lol. You weren't kidding about your post, ic.

Thanks, Marius!

-John

Marius: (or anyone else)

Why do think the Wix.com hostingplan is idiotic?

I have made a website there and it looks great and I don't have to pay to be able to put audio and video's up. Their hostprice is about the same as Dreamhost (around 100 $/year).

My website ;) :

http://www.wix.com/gijsvanbeusekom/Gijs-van-Beusekom?partner%5Fid=WMGs4POB1ko%2Da&experiment%5Fid=empty&wsess=&wixComputerID=5rLo7GPC6kMJHuFjFk%2Bg3RkGds0UESYqr3jtxW4jLzYE%2FdYtPOGz6iocQTXDet0eUqC6iutkpMmEhe2B21T2oQ%3D%3D&gu%5Fid=ba3d2fef%2D9397%2D43c5%2D88a4%2D15403331a7ef&orgDocID=cjSvtz%3Bhh0Q%2Da

And I have a second question:

I don't really get the whole hosting principle. I have bought a domain (gijsvanbeusekom.com. Can't I just let, for example, Dreamhost host the wix.com site with my domain?

Okay, I'll break it down:

Wix sites are recognizable since they're all built from the same modules. I find them garish, but if you like them then that's not a negative point.

You will never have to pay to be able to put up video/audio/picture files. You just put them up. That's for any site. As for your particular Wix, the content is fine (though I don't understand what the mountain pictures are for), but the design is painful to look at. It looks cartoony with the colours and layout and the buttons swelling and flying all over the place. Plus, as a free Wix user you still have the Wix advertising at the bottom which is just yucky. I'm being harsh on Wix, not on you. Let's continue.

Price-wise, Wix's "Unlimited" plan offers 2.5GB of storage, and unlimited shared bandwidth, and the ability to host one domain all for just $14.95/month or $12.40 or so if you're in for a year. Cool.

Dreamhost's standard hosting plan offers unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of hostable domains (so if you own several other domains you can host them all on the one account for no extra charge), plus you can use Google to handle your site's email (or any other system you prefer besides gmail), plus you get an unlimited number of said site-specific email addresses (blahblah@gijs.com), plus you have access to install and modify the database plugins, plus you get one free domain registration per year (WHOIS privacy enabled), plus unlimited subdomains (breakfast.gijs.com), plus access to your site via FTP, to the log files, 100% uptime guarantee...

And that's for $8.95 per month. And of course you can add upgrades like a unique IP address, virtual private hosting, etc for extra bits per month if you choose to. So...QED.

To your last question, no. If you buy a Wix premium plan then you can get gijsvanbeusekom.com to go to your Wix site, but you can't have Dreamhost hosting it. Wix won't let you because they want you to use their (painfully bad) services. If you want to use Dreamhost to host your domain, then you need to create your site somewhere else. You have the freedom to use literally any tools at your disposal. You could build it yourself, you could use an infrastructure like Wordpress (free and installs on your server in 5 minutes) and customize one of their MANY templates to suit your needs (HERE are some very affordable and extremely well-designed and coded templates for reference), or you could hire someone (or ask a skilled friend) to build the site for you.

Here's my site:

http://justintokke.com/

This version of the site is a new one recently activated. It's still got some bugs but its mostly complete. It is built on Wordpress architecture and based on a modified template.

Okay, I'll break it down:

Wix sites are recognizable since they're all built from the same modules. I find them garish, but if you like them then that's not a negative point.

You will never have to pay to be able to put up video/audio/picture files. You just put them up. That's for any site. As for your particular Wix, the content is fine (though I don't understand what the mountain pictures are for), but the design is painful to look at. It looks cartoony with the colours and layout and the buttons swelling and flying all over the place. Plus, as a free Wix user you still have the Wix advertising at the bottom which is just yucky. I'm being harsh on Wix, not on you. Let's continue.

Price-wise, Wix's "Unlimited" plan offers 2.5GB of storage, and unlimited shared bandwidth, and the ability to host one domain all for just $14.95/month or $12.40 or so if you're in for a year. Cool.

Dreamhost's standard hosting plan offers unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of hostable domains (so if you own several other domains you can host them all on the one account for no extra charge), plus you can use Google to handle your site's email (or any other system you prefer besides gmail), plus you get an unlimited number of said site-specific email addresses (blahblah@gijs.com), plus you have access to install and modify the database plugins, plus you get one free domain registration per year (WHOIS privacy enabled), plus unlimited subdomains (breakfast.gijs.com), plus access to your site via FTP, to the log files, 100% uptime guarantee...

And that's for $8.95 per month. And of course you can add upgrades like a unique IP address, virtual private hosting, etc for extra bits per month if you choose to. So...QED.

To your last question, no. If you buy a Wix premium plan then you can get gijsvanbeusekom.com to go to your Wix site, but you can't have Dreamhost hosting it. Wix won't let you because they want you to use their (painfully bad) services. If you want to use Dreamhost to host your domain, then you need to create your site somewhere else. You have the freedom to use literally any tools at your disposal. You could build it yourself, you could use an infrastructure like Wordpress (free and installs on your server in 5 minutes) and customize one of their MANY templates to suit your needs (HERE are some very affordable and extremely well-designed and coded templates for reference), or you could hire someone (or ask a skilled friend) to build the site for you.

Yeah, I agree it's not the most professional looking site, but in WordPress I'm not able to upload mp3's, mpg's etc., because I need a Space upgrade/video upgrade to be able to do that. Is there a way to insert it otherwise, because with the upgrade's it gets quite expensive.

From their site:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/audio/

The first of four ways reads as follows and requires no extra plugins, no purchases, no nothing:

Upload an mp3 file somewhere on the internet and link to it using our audio shortcode (if you have found a mp3 file elsewhere, simply grab its URL). To do this, switch to the HTML view when creating/editing a post or page. Next, enter the shortcode, which looks like this: [audio ], with the address inside. For example:

[audio http://wpcom.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/mattmullenweg-interview.mp3]

Obviously you can also just put your music on SoundCloud and grab the widget code from there and put that into your post. Also free. Same works for video — you can embed a file from literally all the major video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. that you happen to have the file on.

I second the Soundcloud idea. You can also remove the link to the soundcloud profile/upload in the copy/paste text... simply put you can remove the link and for your user, it would be no different than if you were hosting your media on your own server. However, I don't think you can put a soundcloud playlist on your site. If you're sold on using soundcloud, you can download a wordpress plugin that lets you create "I-Frames," which basically use the border of your website page as a "frame" for another website. This way people don't have to leave your site to get to a playlist of your works.

You can use www.reverbnation.com as a place to upload your work. I like reverbnation for their widgets. I can create a widget playlist of my music and put it on my site. The problem with this is you can't remove the link from the widget to reverbnation. You lose link-juice this way and it looks less like a playlist belonging to your website. But still, there are several different playlist widgets to choose from if you go that route.

One thing you can do with your site is pick a domain name that more generally indicates what you do as opposed to who you are... music4media[dot]com or something as opposed to joesmith[dot]com. Why do this? First, you establish business based on what you do rather than who you are which is far easier to market through ads and search engines... second, you can open your web-based business to invite like-minded composers (perhaps who are less literate on the net) to create a playlist that you can market for them and collect a small percentage from the business that your site and marketing generates for them... OR you can simply charge for marketing for them and collect a subscription/membership fee every month... third, you're then establishing yourself as a "leader" of a larger organization of other composers, which bodes quite well for your own marketing efforts when all these other composers are affiliated with you and you with them. This is simply using your social network as leverage to achieve higher-paying projects and generally establish a "brand" of sorts for what you do.

That's one of several approaches you can take using the web to start a business as a composer. Freelancing is great, but that's just the beginning of what you can do with web-based business.

However, I don't think you can put a soundcloud playlist on your site.

FYI, you can in the exact same way as you can with individual songs — just create and share the playlist (called a "set" on the site) and customize the player however you like. You can see it in action on my homepage, which is why I linked to it.

Okay, time for my not-so-brief rundown of social networking for music professionals:

Website:

The one thing you absolutely must without a doubt have is your own personal website. It's all well and good to have a million social networking tentacles, but if you don't have a body to attach them to and have them lead to/sprout from then you're not really putting out any sort of consistent image. So step one is definitely have your own site. Preferably buy your own domain (so that you're www.putridmarmoset.com instead of www.putridmarmoset.blogspot/wordpress/tumblr/etc.com) and get a good hosting plan (I recommend Dreamhost). Once you have a good hosting plan and a domain, WordPress makes it really easy (and free) to work from a template to create a sleek, efficient, and compatible design that is easy to customize and maintain. SquareSpace is beautiful but expensive. Be wary of things like Wix — they seem nice, but their service/hosting plans are idiotic, and the fact that they're Flash-based and building-block oriented makes them terribly inefficient and distractingly overwrought.

Everything Else:

Once you have a central hub (your site) where all important information, pieces, credentials, etc are clearly laid out, THEN you can worry about having profiles on your favourite social networks — but the aim is to get people to visit your site, which is where all the information is. In terms of which networks you need to be on...none, really. It depends on your free time and your needs. Each profile you create means extra maintenance/update time, even if you link several together. Twitter is big and is a nice way to get a bunch of quick info and tidbits out to a big audience...once you get followers. Facebook is for friends. LinkedIn is the must-have professional profile. MySpace should die in a hole, drowning in the tears of broken dreams.

Most social networking sites nowadays will allow you to link status updates...so for instance every time you update your Facebook status, it gets pushed to Twitter as well as a new tweet, and LinkedIn takes the new tweet and sets it as your status update on there too. That way, you only need to do the updating once. You can also check out online services or standalone programs like Socialite that help you keep on top of multiple social networking accounts. Remember that you want to be as efficient as possible with this...if you're spending two hours each day updating and screwing with your social networking, then it's more of a distraction than a help. Keep it lean and keep it working for you.

YouTube is a great way to get your music out to a huge audience. Best idea: put together a demo reel video that showcases your best music. Try to use interesting accompanying visuals and keep the whole thing fairly short. Make sure there are clear links to your website (remember, it's the centre of your online presence), and that no one could possibly have any trouble figuring out who you are, what you do, and where they can hear more. I wouldn't use YouTube as my host for all demo material. It's just inefficient. But having a reel on there is a good idea.

Having a blog is another smart idea. Nice place to share all major news in more words than Twitter would allow for and with more elaborate formatting and content than Facebook would. WordPress is not only a blogging engine, as most people believe, it's a fully featured website architecture...but if your site is powered by WordPress then obviously you can easily integrate a great blog on your website. Alternatives if you don't use WordPress but need a blog include Tumblr, TypePad, Expression Engine, and Blogger. Personally, I think Blogger is pretty disgusting, have no qualms with TypePad, like the look but not the usability of EE, and I use and love Tumblr for its gorgeous looks and extensive customization options.

You're already social networking...right here! This forum, and any others you're on, are an opportunity to meet like-minded people, advertise your services (if an appropriate section for such things exists), and learn things. Don't forget that.

Usefulness:

How useful social networking is professionally depends a lot on how good you are at it. There's an art to good social networking, and it's about treating your fans/followers/etc with respect and recognizing that — professionally speaking — they aren't likely to give a scraggy what you had for breakfast. If you have a professional profile, keep the tweets on topic. Random, funny, sure — but if you want people to keep following you then give them interesting information. Useful tips are great. Show them new music. Tell them how you did it. Let them know what you're working on. Ask them questions! Basically interact with them directly and levelly. If you really feel the need to let people know about your breakfast, consider opening a second Twitter/whatever profile that's personal and is intended for your creepy-donkey friends who need to be able to stalk your day-to-day activities in the minutiae of details you feel is necessary to provide.

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Useful services that are not social networking sites per se, but which I have found vital:

SoundCloud: beautiful player, extensive and generous hosting plans, extensive statistics, and easy shareability (via widgets, short links, etc). An excellent choice for hosting your music.

DropBox: Brilliant system for managing, maintaining, and delivering files across multiple computers. Currently I'm testing it as the primary delivery system for all my professional submissions and it's quickly becoming invaluable.

Box.net: Another decent service for hosting and displaying files online. Has a player for audio files but is not specialized in audio hosting and promotion like SoundCloud is.

BandCamp: The best online service I'm aware of for selling your music on YOUR terms. No service fees, you set your prices, and you can sell audio in multiple formats (Mp3, Lossless FLAC, etc)

Scribd: Does for documents what SoundCloud does for audio. Need to host your resume somewhere so you can embed it live on your site and not force people to download things if they don't want to? Scribd is your new friend.

Bit.ly: One of the oldest and best link shortening services.

PayPal: The best and most ubiquitous online payment system. An international freelancer's dream system.

Wufoo: Extremely versatile and powerful online system for making, distributing, and maintaining forms, surveys, etc.

Gist: Ridiculously thorough but genius system for managing all your contacts from all your social networks, email accounts, and other online presences. Takes a while to set it up, but it's really useful once you do.

So that you can see all this in action and so that I can use it as an excuse to promote my site a bit (you see what I'm doing here — take notes!), I'll walk you through my own implementation of all the things I've just outlined by using my website as an example:

www.mathazzar.com

Things I've done:

• Right off the bat, you see my logo (yay branding) and subtitle (Composer for Media — clear establishment of what I do)
• Underneath that is the navigation, which we'll get to, and below that is a customized Soundcloud player displaying my Demo Reel
• Underneath that, big icons linking to my major social networking presences (feel free to follow/add me, by the way, I'll be happy to reciprocate)
• I have a personal Facebook acount and a page that I update and have fans on for my professional work — updates to the page automatically get sent to Twitter
• My portfolio page needs a bit of a facelift, but basically it has my work organized by project — fresher ones using SoundCloud, older ones using my old Flash player
• About Me is clear and self-explanatory — who I am and why you should care
• The Journal redirects you to my Tumblr page, which is what I use to handle my blogging. All my news goes there and, of course, Tumblr can optionally update my Twitter too with each new post (automatically shortening the link)
• The Resume page uses Scribd to display my resume for all to see/print/save without forcing them to download anything if they don't want to
• Contact page has a form (built through Wufoo) that lets people contact me without needing to open their email programs, and all my other major contact information is there
• Right at the bottom is a donation button where friendly folks can send me money via PayPal if they so choose (*cough*).

Things I still have to do:

• Integrate the look of my new personal site (www.mariusmasalar.com) with my professional site (www.mathazzar.com)
• Make a video reel of my music work for my YouTube profile
• Make a custom background for my Twitter profile page
• Prettify my professional website's Portfolio page

Wrap-Up:

And that just about sums it up. It's a long post, but it's actually a fairly brief rundown of my thoughts on social networking. To close, I'll say that to me it's been very valuable — I've met colleagues, gotten jobs, and had an easier time staying in touch with clients and friends than I would have otherwise. Rules of thumb for social networking: make it work for you, don't let it dominate your schedule and impede your work by distracting you. Also, make sure you're easy to get a hold of for prospective clients. I understand that having multiple secret aliases protects you from having the big bad internet people come rape you in your sleep, but if you want to be known, recognized, and contacted then it helps to be at least moderately open about your identity.

That's all for now. As with everything, the above is just a set of opinions and may not apply to everyone. Think and adapt it for your particular circumstances. Still, I hope it's helpful to those who can make some use of the knowledge! :happy:

This post deserves a medal!

Especially so for this line

MySpace should die in a hole, drowning in the tears of broken dreams.