The schizophrenia of an online presence

Years ago, I had a postcard on my wall above my student desk. It showed a map of Soho, and was captioned with several “You Are Here”s, complete with arrows, all over the map. The title, fittingly, was “A Schizophrenic’s Map Of Soho”.

Welcome to the baffling world of the online presence. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Soundcloud, Sentric, Jango, Spotify, Last FM, Bandcamp – you are here, here, here, here and here…

If I google my name, in quotations, bearing in mind there really aren’t many other “Casee Wilson”s out there, I get 20,000 hits, all scattered like confetti to the four winds. I’m even on sites I have no control over and know nothing about, and sites as far flung as China, Japan, Russia and Iceland. Sound familiar?

The internet has done it’s job well. Release even a mere syllable, let’s say ‘eh’, at breakfast and by noon there is a website asking “know ‘eh’? Add band info for ‘eh’ here”. And it’s usually in Estonia.

The problem is, there are so many sites that it has become a bit of a full time job to maintain any sort of sensible web presence. So I inevitably give up, and procrastinate in favour of exploding gems in an un-named, well known, bust-as-many-gems-as-you-can-in-60-seconds game. And the internet doesn’t help, either.

Take Facebook. Until you have a certain number of “likes” you can’t run it with a normal nice web address. Prior to gaining a fan base of a certain number you are doomed to have a facebook page with a URL looking something like: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heres-My-Band-Name/48759879278562987372898378972898172878278

Mmm. Catchy.

Even when you have the right number of “likes” and can have http//www.facebook.com/HeresMyBandName, in order to even have a page in the first place, you have to have a primary, normal, personal facebook account. So, whenever you use any other sites that sync to Facebook, they sync to, yes, you guessed it, your PERSONAL account. Blogs, music streaming, etc. It’s like useful but different. It becomes very difficult for you to keep your music/business stuff separate from your personal stuff.

I know of users who have got round this by setting up personal accounts as their music ones, which works slightly better now that Facebook aren’t banning people from using unconventional account names, so workarounds are available. I’m just going to have to keep plugging on with mine as it is, as when I started Facebook it was difficult to get any sort of functionality from pages anyway!

Which leads me to my next point. It is improving. Slowly but surely, many programs are allowing you to sync across several accounts at once, meaning you can do blogs and music updates at one site, press a button, and lo, facebook, twitter, and myspace will all see the action. Since this doesn’t account for smaller communities like Soundcloud and Bandcamp however, there is still some need for manual updateage.

My solution is inelegant, but has worked better than anything else I’ve tried. I set aside 30 minutes a day for web admin. I have a notebook containing web addresses and passwords for every site I run an active presence on (meaning I can do this from any computer, not just one on which the bookmarks are saved), and I work through the list checking whether there are any updates to apply, songs to upload, or old materials to delete. This keeps the todo list fractionally smaller and means I have a targetted period of time in which to do whatever I can, rather than eating into writing/recording time

However, I’m open for technically easy suggestions you all might have. I’m a luddite at heart, and some of the intricacies of setting up feeds and syncs is lost on me, but if you have found/developed a better way to manage your online presence, please do share it!

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