After months of writing, I realized that the Women of the Way blog is really an author’s page, not a book page and that I needed to separate the two. Additionally, while converting Facebook to Timeline, I took a closer look at my Facebook presence and realized that I needed an author’s page to separate my personal self from my public self. Now I have three Facebook pages and three blogs: Jane Blanchard, the personal me; Jane V. Blanchard, the author; and the book—a classic case of author identity crisis.
The down side is I lost Facebook friends and likes in the transition. The new authors Facebook page needs your help. Please follow the link and “like” it.
With this clearer vision, I wanted each page to have its own look and content, making it easy to distinguish one from the other. To make that distinction, I created separate emails, favicons, avatars, twitter accounts, and branding. It got complicated so I created a matrix to manage the three separate identities. Without it I would be lost.
My biggest problem was with the avatars. Since avatars are based on email addresses, I had to create new addresses. Not knowing that I could get additional mail addresses linked to my existing email account, I created separate accounts which now require daily attention. Since I had created the Facebook and Web pages with the same email address, I had to change the profile of each to reflect the new one. This was iterative, but straightforward. Changing the Twitter account profiles was more difficult, like playing Whac-A-Mole. Each time I tried to change one address a different problem would pop up.
In Twitter, I had the wrong email address associated with each account which meant I had the wrong avatar. Since each account must have a distinctive email address, I created a “fake” email address as a place holder in one Twitter account so I could moved that email address with its associated avatar to the correct Twitter account. This took several days, because I exceeded the limit to the number of changes per day that one can make to Twitter accounts. Even though I was in the account, Twitter would prohibit the change with the message “Incorrect password! Please enter your current password to change your account settings.” I ended up changing the password several times, before allowing me to make changes.
Though it has taken more that a week to develop these new pages and work out the kinks, I believe the time was well spent. I like the new direction and the new look. I learned a lot about the workings of the accounts and am preparing to tackle new marketing techniques that I have been studying.
Tell me if you like the new look. I would love to hear from you.
