In a recent post on Daily SEO Blog, the "Top 25" to watch are listed and many of them provide [a few] very bad examples of social media savvy.

I checked the list for FriendFeed adopters. By the way, Robert Scoble (one of the real social media mavens, too obvious to be listed on this particular blog post) gets it right every time and he's huge on FriendFeed. He's the reason I checked it out, dissed it, checked it out again, and finally understood why the cool kids were going to FriendFeed.

Guess what? Two in the top ten couldn't be found but via their Twitter usernames. So, if you only knew their real name it'd be impossible to find them. That's not good branding! Unsurprisingly a few list members had zero, one, only a few posts, or practically no follows or followers. One of the "Top 25" isn't even on FriendFeed, or at least you can't find him using his name, Twitter username, or anything else I know about him. And, the best known listed personality can't be found using his name (which is how most folks know him).

How could this be?

Simple. People often mistake amazing content for savvy social media expertise. If you're a bonafide social media expert, you should know and practice the basics. What are the basics? Rule #1 is make it extremely easy for people to find you and make it easier for them to buy!

"Buy" means take action, whatever that action may be. If it's sign a contract, give you money, or follow you on social media account, make it extremely simple to do. How do you do that? Tell them your name, unify your brand, use the same username (or some close variation) everywhere, and participate as much as you can in every single social media venue that has a significant number of participants, whether that's your present audience or not.

If you're Gary Vaynerchuk, that Wine Library guy with one of the coolest online shows ever, you can make this mistake and it won't matter as much. After all, millions of folks are paying close attention to him and his company sells 50+ million a year in product online. But, he got there before this wave of social media even began. His content rocks, and that generates fans. If you're starting from ground zero, or breaking into this new arena you'd better not mess up and list yourself in FriendFeed without your publicly known name.