This is part one in a two part series explaining the lessons I learned from registering my username on about 150 social sites in a short time frame.  Part 1 deals with the process of registering my user name on many social media sites.  Part 2 takes an in-depth look at sign-up processes used by many start-ups, and suggests ways to improve them.  If you’re an entrepreneur into UX, make sure you read Part 2 when we release it.

Registering your user name on many social media sites is extremely time consuming, risks being disingenuous, will get you bombarded with emails and can even put you in a situation where you must deal with dozens of real messages across hundreds of websites every day.  Sounds horrible, doesn’t it?  But wait! There’s a bright side!

Some say that the username is the new domain name.  Registering early on ensures that you get ‘first dibs’ on a username that you may find desirable.  This will, in turn, help you with SEO, since your profiles should all point to the same websites.  Throughout the process, you’ll find that it will force you to ask an important question: “how should I represent myself on the Internet”.  You’ll end up using a password manager, which can only help you from a security standpoint.  Finally, you’re likely to find a treasure trove of apps that you can’t live without.  Oh, and if you happen to be an entrepreneur/designer/passionate about building web applications, then going through many registrations will inspire you to create or tweak your own.

Full details (how long it took, which sites rocked (and didn’t), how i saved time, etc) and analysis below.

The Process

Websites like usernamecheck.com and knowem.com brand themselves as sites that  “thwart social media identity theft” and “check username availability”.  They can also be used as gateways to many sites that you may not have ever heard of.  I believe that you don’t really know an application until you’ve actually used it.  With this in mind, I took a deep breath and chose to go through the knowem.com list myself to get to know these sites.  I chose knowem.com because the list was bigger, and easier to use.

Things to prep before you start (and that I wish I’d known first):

• Chose 3 usernames that you’d like to be identified with.  The first will be the one that you’d ideally like to hold on all sites.  In my case, I used “seanpower”.  The second and third are your fallback names if the first is taken.  I used “iamseanpower” and “seansense”.
• Have a good hi-res profile picture on hand.  It doesn’t really matter what it is – your face, a picture you made, a WeeMee – the idea is to have something consistent that people will recognize as yours, assuming they see it often enough.
• Have a profile picture?  Good.  Now make ‘light’ versions of it – ideally under 50k.  You’ll want multiple versions: PNG, JPG and GIF.  In my case, I had in total: “sean-hires.png” (209k), “sean-lowres.png” (21k), “sean.gif” (35k) and sean.jpg (8k).  By default, I use the hires .png unless the site has different requirements (some only accept, GIF and JPG, some only JPG, some only files under 100k, etc).
• Create a tagline for yourself, under 140 characters.  “Mine reads: O’Reilly author, analytics practitioner, startup accelerator, likes to throw sheep.”  Use our character counter to figure out if you’re over 140 characters, and for tagline examples & inspiration.
• Create a small bio, under 250 characters.  Mine reads: “I consult, analyze, write, speak and like to throw sheep. I co-wrote a book for O’Reilly called Complete Web Monitoring with http://twitter.com/acroll. You can find out more about me at http://www.watchingwebsites.com and on Twitter as @seanpower”.  Again, use our character counter to figure out if you’re over 140 characters, and for tagline examples & inspiration.
• Download and use a password manager.  You’ll find a great review of password managers on Lifehacker.  I swear by 1Password (OSX only, sorry PC folks).  It allowed me to quickly create many (150!) passwords, store them, and let me log in to sites with very few issues.
• I didn’t use this, but a form completion tool like Autofill Forms might help you save more time.

Thankfully, knowem.com saved me tons of time by bringing me straight to registration pages.  From here, the steps are pretty straight forward:

• Sign in as a new user if necessary,
• fill in all appropriate information,
• wait for a validation email (usually takes about 30-60 seconds),
• validate your email,
• log in to the site,
• fill in your profile information,
• upload a picture,
• invite friends if you want (I always opted out of this – I’m not going to harass my friends with hundreds of “Join This Site!” notifications),
• play with the site,
• note the ones that you want to come back to later.

You will need approximately 20 hours to register your profile on about 150 sites. I try and give every site at least 10 minutes of my time to poke around, search for friends, customize my profile and generally understand the site’s goal(s).  Even after 10 minutes, I was unable to determine the goal or purpose of some of the sites.  Go figure!

Once you’ve accomplished all of this, knowem.com should look like so:

What did we learn?

The Pros

Some of the benefits of registering your profile on many social sites include:

Owning Your Name

Registering the same name makes you findable and memorable.  For example, you can count on the fact that adding “seanpower” on most sites will likely be me.  When it isn’t, you’ll easily be able to search for my alternate names.  I’ve ensured that I’m holding onto a common and memorable name across popular social sites, make it extremely easy for you to find me if you need to.  I’m also preventing others from using/assuming my “digital identity”.

Creating An Brand/Identity Strategy

By the time that I’d registered on a few sites, I started seeing patterns emerge.  My bio, my picture, my tagline, my username, all of the sites asked the same types of things from me.  By re-using my bios and pictures, I ended up tweaking it (since it was constantly in front of me) until every word seemed right to me.  In essence, I created my online  “identity and brand”.  Now, everywhere you go, you’ll see a consistent information set that represents all of the things that I want you to know about me.  I hope to become a familiar face that you’re more likely to spot in a digital crowd.

Traffic Building & SEO

By including a URL in your profile (blog, company website, etc), you increase the likelihood that someone will click on it, increasing traffic to your site.  And, if the site in question has SEO ninjas working for it, it may help increase entries related to you in search engines.  For examples, this Google Alerts notification came in about 10 minutes after I registered on gather.com:

Using a Password Manager

There’s no way that you’ll be able to memorize a unique password for each site.  If you use the same password, you’re begging to be hacked.  Thankfully, this exercise should force you to use strong and unique passwords, controlled via password manager.  As I mentioned above, a review on Lifehacker turned me on to 1password for the Mac which worked extremely well.  The only issues happened when registration forms were embedded in JavaScript overlays (the passwords simply wouldn’t automatically fill in).  But there were so few instances of this that the problem didn’t really bother me at all.  I hear that 1Password is working on a PC solution as well.

Finding Awesome Apps

Best of all, using a service like Knowem.com encourages you to try out new sites.  I found that it pushed me to register on ones that I’ve been meaning to use for a long time (like Posterous, for example).  I also found new ones that I’m excited to keep on using, like card.ly, slidesix (please add Keynote support!) and Sphinn (I should’ve been on this years ago!)).

Analyzing Signup Processes

Finally, if you’re creating or revamping your sign up process, you will gain invaluable insight into the do’s and don’ts by learning from others’ mistakes and successes.  I saw abysmal failures and incredibly clean and snappy registration flows in different shapes and sizes.  I’m much more educated on the topic, and have some strong opinions about it which I will be sharing with you in a separate blog post.

The Cons

But it’s not all roses.  There’s a darker side to this post.

Time Consuming & Intense

First of all, it’s time consuming.   I mean . . . reaaaally time consuming.  Ten minutes per site ends up going by pretty fast.  I wouldn’t call the process boring – I was bombarded with lots of cool new sites and ideas every other minute.  But it quickly became too much; information overload.  After a few hours, my ability to enjoy new site experiences diminished considerably.

It’s Disingenuous

One could argue that this entire exercise is disingenuous.  After all, if you’re not registering with the intent of making use of a sites services, it becomes little more than glorified cyber-squatting.  It’s really just holding on to something out of fear that someone else will get the namespace.

You Will Get Flooded With Emails

Way to go, eHow.com!

Enough said?  I chose to opt-out from all newsletters where possible.

You May Become Too Socially Spread Out

The worst part about the above eHow screenshot is that these are real people wanting to connect with me.  It’s not eHow’s fault.  In fact, it’s totally mine!  I started getting tons of messages in my inbox: people complimenting my profile, asking if I’m single (creepy!), asking about my book, asking how I found the site, asking to help them.  Real people expecting to have real conversations, and I could barely do it!  Keeping up with a few social networks is hard work; keeping up with 150 is impossible.  There’s no way to genuinely deal with the signals and noise that multiple networks generate.

And that’s where the whole notion of registering on many sites starts to fall apart.  It’s not really about the cyber-squatting, the SEO or the time involved in signing up to sites . . the reason why it’s rubbish to sign up to 150 social sites is because our brains aren’t wired to keep up with this much data.  If I begin to follow 10 people, and each generates 2 events a day (ie – add a URL, a picture, an interesting status, a reply, a video), that’s a total of 3,000 events to follow and possibly comment on every day.   Halp.

See where I’m going with this? Until an application exists that can aggregate the content of any social site that I choose, the task of “being social” becomes too overwhelming once you “be too social” (sic’ing myself!).  In other words, there’s such a thing as being “too digitally connected”.

You May Always Feel Like You’re Missing Something

And so, as a result, the feeling that someone might be saying something about you and you’re not there to hear it will always be in the back of your head.  Since no consumer-targeted app exists that can track and respond to all of these social media sites in one single pane of glass, you’ll need to hope for lots of time to log into all of the sites that you’ve just created.

Dear Radian6, ScoutLabs, Sysomos, TechRigy and friends – you’re the most likely candidate to make an app like this happen, since you’re so close to being there!  Perhaps some of you are already and I just don’t know it yet! :)

In The End, You Just Want To Go Where Everyone Knows Your Name (Final Thought)

There’s a fine line between being part of social media sites and abusing services by holding on to an identity that you won’t use unless the site begins to show traction.  In the end, I think that it’s inevitable that enterprise services and persons with strong digital identities will come to rely on services like knowem.com to ensure that their online identities are being protected across social computing sites.  However, those that wish to profit from the appropriation of names and identities which do not represent them will continue to lurk in the shadows of our minds.  As is often the case, the burden of responsibility falls on us as individuals, until a common set of rules (ie – legislation) is defined for us.

For better and for worse, these services are here to stay.   What do you think?  Is registering en masse disingenuous or a smart/sound thing to do?

I want to give a brief head nod to 1password and knowem.com for having excellent applications that solve a specific need.  Well done, teams.

In the meantime, I leave you with this:

No related posts.