Jared Cohen, President of Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, and Chief Advisor to Alphabet Executive Chairman (former Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, presented a very interesting keynote at Analytics Experience this month. In it he mentioned the idea of a ‘digital self’. He explained most people have not one but numerous digital selves out in the Ethernet and they should start taking their digital selves just as seriously as their physical one. Your digital selves expose themselves to many more people than your physical one could ever do and their presence is longer lasting!

So what is a digital self? Well, it is your presence on the web, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, to name but a few. Quite often these take on many different personalities – one for work, one for your friends, one for your family, perhaps even one for your alter ego! The point is that they are all out there, and you need to take care of them, to make your digital presence a powerful, professional, and authoritative one.

Many may consider writing a book as an old fashioned, labor intensive, exercise with little return on investment. But consider a book as a launch pad for a whole host of social media and web credibility opportunities. Downloadable web PDFs, eBooks, free excerpts, author videos, blogs, features in online communities, social tiles, shared posts, to name but a few. We use our book content for all of the above at SAS Press and have teams of social media specialists to drive the content, and with it your digital persona, helping nurture and develop your professional digital self -- keeping it fresh and in the public eye.

So as a first step to look after your digital self why not write a short book - we’d love to hear from you – just send us a brief outline – that’s all it takes to get started! Or drop us a line and we’d be happy to discuss the digital possibilities for your content and your digital health!