I spent much of Friday watching the unfolding chaos across Europe. I am in Frankfurt and I have a train booked tomorrow morning to Antwerp, even with a seat reservation. Yippee! Many people in Europe are in the wrong place with no prospect of getting anywhere. There are many stories of pain and courage as people make it happen. Twitter became an amazing space to watch and laugh at the drama. The hashtag #ashtag was coined and the jokes erupted (sorry about that….). I am quoting a small random collection of tweets to help people see how useful or pathetic twitter is, depending on your point of view.

To keep up with this try HashTags/ashtag.

This was on Facebook:

Katharine Dever On a boat crossing the Irish sea! Both my flights cancelled so this is plan c! 8 hour taxi ride from Scotland at 1 am to get me to the event for 9 am…everything crossed! Xx

These are all from Twitter:

FakoGirl Is Iceland now called Waterland? #ashtag #immelting

derekmizak Taking in to account how ash situation is changing Europe will be down for a few more days #ashtag

jchernov The #ashtag hashtag is so damn clever.

gislio Air #travel: Long lines at Calais ferry terminal. Busses waiting to bring ppl to UK. At least there is WIFI. #icerupt #ashtag

darenBBC I was told in major European cities, there are no hire cars, at all. I love this stuff #ashtag

quixoticgeek Some volcanoes erupt for months, even years at a time. What happens if this one does so? Can the world cope without air travel? #ashtag

Sami_Dawn “Buggeringbollickingfuck” is QOTD from @StellaF re the whole #ashtag situ, fyi…

twirus_scand Top5 popular tags: 1^ #ffnor 2^ #ashtag 3^ #facebook 4^ #music 5^ #lastfm http://scandinavia.twirus.com

max_naylor feels sorry for anyone stranded but this volcano needs to vent #icerupt #ashtag

IHphoto Shows just how parochial and self absorbed we are here that #ashtag registers higher than 1100 people killed by Tibet #earthquake

AmeliaGregory I’ve blogged about the spectacular eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland http://tinyurl.com/y3mxm69 & why I love it #ashtag

negaratduke Norwegian PM runs country with his iPad #ashtag http://tinyurl.com/yyulrkb cc @rahafharfoush

pauldavies7 RT @loudmouthman: just waiting for the Daily Mail “Iclanders Unleash Economic crippling sky attack ash cloud in finance retribution” headline #ashtag

mutster101 So, who’s going to take a crack at pronouncing the part of Iceland the eruption was in? #ashtag

charlie_spotted “Sorry Boss, couldn’t get to work today. My train was cancelled. Volcanic Ash on the line.” Think that’ll work? Too soon? #ashtag

alanbrookland Hey Iceland! Ok, we get it, you don’t want to pay off the debt. Lay off the volcano weapons! #ashtag

Barnfee I bet BA’s gutted that this didn’t happen during the strike. #ashtag

qikipedia: The 1783 Icelandic #ashcloud caused record low levels in the Nile; Japan suffered the third worst famine in its history #ashtag

qikipedia: “The skies were clogged with ash: a summer when the sun never shone ..one of the worst winters in living memory”- B. FRANKLIN #ashtag

ponddrop ARRH! Sister must arrive! Want to have baby, dammit! #ashtag #stupidvolcano

MikeTheRelic Huge grey cloud settles over Scotland. No-one notices. #ashtag

JamesTLowe So, no flights permitted in UK Controlled Airspace from Midday, until 1800. That’s unprecedented in my memory. http://bit.ly/mIaXL #ashtag

kiwanja Ghost town: British Airways T5 check-in. No flights even being re-booked for tomorrow, apparently. #ashtag http://twitpic.com/1fqdnd

benmarsh: I’ve set up a #ukash map (#uksnow style) at http://ukash.benmarsh.co.uk – Send your reports and photos! :) Please RT #ashtag #ukvolcano

CopyrightGirl When I used my Bank of Iceland debit card in Asda they asked if I wanted any ashback… #ashtag

janinegibson: Now Denmark is closed. #ashtag http://bit.ly/c3ndb6

mckennamiller Plane delayed due to #fuckingvolcano #ashtag (@ Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) w/ 6 others)

Sami_Dawn “Buggeringbollickingfuck” is QOTD from @StellaF re the whole #ashtag situ, fyi…

quixoticgeek Some volcanoes erupt for months, even years at a time. What happens if this one does so? Can the world cope without air travel? #ashtag

Over the last few days I have been playing with Buzz, the new Social Media idea from Google, and re-organising my email, twitter, facebook and websites. They are all interlinked and form a pattern in my personal and business strategy. At one time I kept these areas separate but as they have become more integrated in my actual (non-digital) life, the digital aspects have inevitably become integrated and mixed up.

It is important to get this right when travelling and working independently. You need to stay on top of what’s happening in your world and people need to keep in touch with myou It is easy to fall of the edge and disappear.

I came across another blogger using Buzz and decided it would be fun to try it. It seemed a better prospect for micro-blogging than twitter, you actually have visual flexibility and a bigger size of message, but it doesn’t have all the clutter and crap of facebook. So I set up my Google Profile, that was a doddle as I already have a google account. I use calendar and reader extensively. The only pain was yet another username/url.

Google Profile is very useful. It’s a place where you can put all your contact details, and urls in one place where they are easy to find and follow. Google’s uncluttered visual style helps this a lot.

Setting Up Buzz

I hit a barrier, how do I actually use buzz? Ahh! I can only do it from gmail! Oh that’s a problem, I don’t use it. I used it for a while as an archive for my mail but the locking of my google account with the gmail address was annoying (it still is – Google take note!). I have a great email provider, fastmail, that allows me to use email addresses with different domain names and direct them wherever I want. (I will do a post on this sometime because what they provide is essential to any digitally aware person.) They have a webmail interface, which I use in internet cafes, and a great imap service. I have used many different clients, on windows, mac and various phones, and always had a good connection. Oh but gmail doesn’t operate as an imap client, you can only imap into them (Google, again, take note, this is annoying people who want flexibility. As buzz develops it will become a block for its use.)

So a major decision lay ahead, forget about buzz and its potential future or re-organise my email. I know I could just use a separate gmail for buzz, but the whole beauty of it is its tight integration with emailingmakes it so easy to use. I made the leap and re-setup my gmail account and re-directed the mail from my various addresses to gmail. I still use fastmail for this, it means I keep control of my email and re-direct it to somewhere else if I get to not like gmail. Doing this I don’t have to change any email addresses, something I vowed never to do. I add new ones but all the old ones still work, it doesn’t actually matter what address people use.

I have all my new mail going directly into gmail without people knowing. Gmail has a facility to import the mail I still have in fastmail. So there it is. There is no email left in fastmail, it just operates now as a re-direct service, but a good one. I’m using Buzz and all is great. I am enjoying the gmail interface and features, I look forward to the good stuff continuing.

Personal Brand

I realised I had another issue when I set up my google profile, I had too many confusing places for people to go to connect with me. I decided that this had to change. This issue has grown because I actively run three blogs, each indifferent areas. There is this one, ‘Travels of an Earth Pilgrim’, in the area of life, work and travel, there is ‘Male eXperience‘, dealing with Men and Masculinity, and there is ‘Rising from the Ashes‘ which is a personal blog for whatever I want. I, originally, thought that each would be separate in it’s own niche with it’s own logo, twitter, facebook and email presence.

I started to look at everything in a more planned, long-term way and to focus on my work in writing as a business.

One of the essential factors to success is marketing and branding is a key part of this. I realised I would gain great presence and impact by focusing on me as a the overall brand and building the niches within that as sub-brands. Over the past weeks I have been re-doing the sites to subtly bring in this change and focus them more tightly. Earth Pilgrim and Male eXperience will become the main business parts of the brand while Ashes will just spread and open up my personal brand,. This is a general marketing approach used successfully by Richard Branson, among others.

Twitter and Facebook

I needed to merge my three twitter accounts into one, but, of course, twitter doesn’t do this. Am I the only one who keeps kicking the barriers? At least you can change the username, so I changed the one with most followers, over 5,000 now, to my personal nickname, gphoenix. I tweeted the others to get my followers to move to the new account and crossed my fingers. I will lose followers, but it will settle down in a short while. I closed down my two facebook fan pages and focused everything onto my personal facebook page. I will have to look at this again before I reach the 5,000 limit, perhaps by having a general, business fan page and taking my personal one back to family and close friends. I still have some time to think about it.

Having done all this I then set about re-organising my iPhone to catch up. No problem, the iPhone is such a doddle to configure.

Finally…

I have decided to use and develop my google profile to give people the information they need about me. I will have links to it wherever people arrive so all my details, which wil change and flux, will be up to date in one place. I feel comfortable with the tight focus I am putting on everything and I am happy to develop myself as a brand. I have been doing this in lighting design for years and I have found that it has always been successful.

Look carefully back through my story and see the lessons for yourself and your business.

Make a plan and keep developing it as your client base grows, but remember the longer you leave it the more difficult it becomes and the easier irt is to lose people on the way.

Use the comments to let me know what you are doing and how you are adapting to the shifts in Social Media. Also let me know where you think it is going and where you think I can adapt better.