I’ve been meaning to write this article for awhile.

It was inspired by a presentation that Robby Slaughter shared at Blog Indiana in August 2011.

I had lunch with Robby last month and a few days later found the link to his presentation, Remaining Productive While Using Social Media.

Click on the link above and you’ll see the 20 slide presentation Robby shared.

What stuck out when I saw it live was the 90-9-1 principle that Robby explained.

90% of the people who read what you write online only want to read. Robby calls them Lurkers.

9% of the people who read what you write will interact with you on occasion.

1% of the people who read what you write will interact with you a lot.

When you apply this a a blog, as I did, I realized that it was ridiculous to measure the impact of what I was writing by the number of comments I received on the blog.  Granted, at that time I was pushing out more than 30 articles a week on several ScLoHo blog sites.

Some articles were Google magnets.  They contained information that folks were Googling and at one point if you Googled “ScLoHo”, there would be over 200,000 results.

For the past year, I have been working on rebranding myself away from ScLoHo and focusing on my given name of Scott Howard.

That is why I bought the ScottHoward.me domain and have been using this site since October, 2011.

Scott Howard is a common name.  A year ago none of the Scott Howard links on the first page of a Google search pointed to me.

Now there are usually 3 of the top 10 Google Search results that point to me.  They include my LinkedIn profile, my Twitter account and this website.

This rebranding that I started a year ago was not to eliminate the ScLoHo brand.

My goal was to merge the online identity of ScLoHo, with my in person, face to face identity as Scott Howard.

I am happy with the results.  Instead of posting 30+ articles per week, I post 3 each week.

Going back to the 90-9-1 numbers for a moment.

I have been surprised by what people know about me, but it’s that 90% that read but rarely respond online.

Also instead of comments being posted on my website, I find because of my use of Twitter primarily and Facebook secondarily, Twitter and Facebook get more comments and allow me to be conversational.

I have said this to my radio clients for years, “Blog to build your online reputation”. Google likes your blog posts.

And now I also say use Facebook and Twitter too.  People like to talk with you online.