A newborn baby is a magical thing, someone whose identity has just been named. Anybody involved in social media is a special person, with a high probability of having multiple personalities and pages to suit them all. Here are two tips that can help each one of these people.
Naming email
It’s good to be frugal. With gifts, it’s good to be especially thoughtful and frugal.
Do you have a friend who is about to have a baby? If you’re searching for a truly unique baby gift idea how about giving the parents an email address with their baby’s name? Yourfriends.babyname@gmail.com is an excellent gift, if the parents haven’t already secured it. You can get one in Yahoo, Gmail or roll the dice on one of the other email address suffixes.
Granted if the baby’s name is Susan Jones, that email address may already be taken. If that’s the case then throw their middle initial into the mix and see if SusanM. Jones is taken. Either way, it’s a form of cyber squatting, but it’s for the children so nobody will castigate you for it.
Should you reserve the .com domain for that child? Not everybody has a .com and one certainly isn’t needed, presuming that you aren’t in business or a celebrity. A newborn is too young for a Facebook page or twitter account; that would just be silly-and mom/dad will have too much to do to maintain either of them.
For the masses
A curse and blessing of social media is that each channel is segmented and has its own personality. Some people need to only see your Linkedin account while others go straight to Facebook. The bugger is that your business card is only so big, which social media accounts do you place on it?
One solution to this is to simply direct everybody to you About.me page. About.me is a landing page that can list all of your social media platforms on that one page. From there people can go to where they are most comfortable, be it your YouTube channel with your karaoke videos or your Flickr photo stream with those artsy photos.
The only downside to About.me is that it requires an additional click through to get people to your channels. That fact is compensated by all of your accounts being listed on one page. Pick your poison. If it’s worthwhile, sign up for an About.me account and see if your name is available. If it’s not available then you can do something close to your name, but keep it professional because you can’t change it and the world will see it.
