Gravatar, branding and you

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 8:10 am

Okay I know it is a pain trying to keep up with everything you hear about each and every day. Today I am going to address something simple for those that actually participate in the conversations going on in the blogosphere.

See the defauilt on WordPress blogs is to use Gravatar for comments. Most people don’t go through all the settings when they create a new blog so the vast majority of blogs will look for your gravatar when you comment. Besides the gravatar system works and even though I do go through the settings I still use it because it is one of the more popular ones.

Gravatar allows you to link your email to your picture and have it display when you post a comment. Just go to http://gravatar.com and follow the directions to tie your email address and picture together.

Now I would much rather have people reading my comments see my picture to the left rather than the default gravatar image to the right.

It helps people know who I am especially as I use the same picture on Facebook, Twitter, MyBlogLog and any other social network where I can add a picture to my profile.

Now for you bashful types it does not have to be a picture of you. It can be whatever avatar you use to brand yourself with on the social networks and forums. I have a buddy who uses a fish graphic on Twitter and went to his picture and people ignored him because he was no longer the grinning fish and they did not recognize his tweets.

The whole reason for this post is that on average less than half of the commenters on this blog have a gravatar. I work hard to make sure that people adding to the conversation here get the maximum reward for it and this will increase the value you get from commenting here. So go get your avatar set up at http://gravatar.com so that all my commenters get maximum branding. It only takes a few quick minutes.

As always your questions and comments are appreciated.

Mike Paetzold