A month ago, I woke up in a cold sweat after having a nightmare. In my dream, I received a manilla envelope at my house, full of personal pictures from childhood through a recent vacation. The photos were of myself, my family, even the inside of my house. As the dream evolved, I came to realize I was being stalked by a sociopathic killer, and right before I woke up, I realized the stalker was using social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter to create an accurate personal history, including the photos. My wife and I readily agreed it would make a great movie, entitled something like MyFace or SpaceBook.

Fast forward a week and I was asked by Visibility Magazine to create an article for their upcoming issue. I suggested exploring the balance between sharing personal information and marketing yourself with the need for privacy and security. They liked the idea and I started doing research. It didn't take long for me to uncover a few hairy stories involving identity theft and fraud, perpetrated via social media. In one case, a hacker was able to access a friend's bank account using MySpace information. In another case, a soldier stationed in Iraq had his bank account repeatedly accessed, using information available on Facebook. The bottom line: the problem is real, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Part of my research included talking to the folks at Identity Experts here in Portland...a very sharp group of folks that can help individuals fight identity theft and repair their ID quickly. One of the greatest insights is that many of your backup password verification questions are answered in your social media profiles (dog name, child or mother's name, birthday, etc.). They recommend changing answers to verification questions like "What is my favorite color?" to another random password that only you would know. For more tips and tricks, visit my blog post and look for the January issue of Visibility Magazine for a more comprehensive article.

The second component of my research was to ask the same question to my network on LinkedIn. Within 24 hours or so, I receive 14 responses. Only one stated "Social media isn't a threat to your identity" while the rest agreed it was a minor, if not major issue. As outlined in my blog post, there are a few reasons this is a problem worth noting and addressing:

-social media sites typically generate revenue based on the amount of information they have about their members, which means they encourage the sharing of private and sensitive information

-these same sites have lax privacy policies and may be suseptible to hackers accessing and compromising user data

-the government is not currently creating or enforcing standards in this arena

-there is still a general lack of knowledge or concern from the public regarding the information they share, who is seeing it and what is done with it

While I'm not a proponent of dropping out of social media because someone might steal your identity or send you photos in an unmarked envelope, you should be taking steps to protect personal information. A few tips from my blog post and article are below:

* Consider unique user names & passwords for each profile
* Avoid listing the following information publicly: date of birth, hometown, home address, year of high school or college graduation, primary email address
* Watch where you post and what you say, as it can be used against you later.
* Google yourself regularly and monitor your credit

If you are not actively managing your profile in social media, someone will do it for you. You've seen the Citibank credit card ads with the voiceover talent extolling the virtue of identity theft; don't become one of them.

Earlier this week I was being interviewed by a blogger for a piece about entrepreneurship. When I explained my long-term vision for Anvil Media[http://www.anvilmediainc.com/search-social-media-marketing-integration-article.h tm], as a 16 person company, he replied, “you need to write your vision down sometime.” The timing was perfect, as I was recently invited to blog for OEN, and wasn’t sure what I was going to write about.

For those of you not familiar with the agency model, it’s very different from software, and even some service-based businesses. In agencies, you typically generate revenue based on the billable hour, similar to accountants and lawyers, but without as much schooling. Profitability is derived from your ability to keep the team fully-billable and your costs down. Sounds easy, right?

I’ve worked at 8 agencies since 1994, two of which I co-founded and one, Anvil, which I founded. On the plus side, I had 4 agency positions under my belt when I co-founded Wave Rock in 1999. Unfortunately, the experience did not end as I would have liked, on many levels. For starters, it was a young, inexperienced team growing through the Internet boom. Differences in values and priorities in executive management further challenged the team and company’s future.

One of my greatest lessons was fully realized the day I returned from vacation a year or so into the Wave Rock experience. A woman walked into our staff meeting holding a cake for my birthday, and I hadn’t seen her before. While I was disappointed they hadn’t hired a dancer for my birthday and that she was in fact a new hire, I realized at 17 employees, that I was starting to lose touch with the company I helped create. I also learned that as you grow beyond 16 or so, what was a creative agency became an HR company.

When I parted ways with Wave Rock in September of 2000, there were 34 employees. Soon after, marketing budgets impacted by April’s stock market crash started to hit Wave Rock hard. By June, the company was down to 14 people, and was soon subsumed by another agency. I believe a slower growth model may have helped save the company.

Since that experience, and a handful of others, I’ve been able to formulate what I think is the ideal size and shape of an agency at which I can work for the rest of my life. My vision for Anvil as a 16 employee strategic consultancy specializing in search engine marketing (SEM) was solidified in 2005. Since then, I’ve made business and personal decisions based on that vision, and it’s worked out well.

To explain a little, Anvil is in a somewhat unique industry: SEM. There is no degree or formal schooling available for aspiring search engine marketers, so we’ve had to develop our own training program. Furthermore, exceptional agency talent is exceptionally difficult to find. I’ve spent 12 years looking for ‘A talent,’ and I finally believe we’re nearly there. At 13 employees, Anvil is only 3 away from our ideal size. Then it gets interesting.

If you think about it, the challenges commonly faced by agencies relate to recruiting and retaining clients and employees. If you artificially limit the size of the company, you can increase the quality of the employees, as well as the clients. Any time we find an employee or client that is a better strategic fit for Anvil, we can ‘upgrade’ accordingly.

However, down the road, we may reach the point where we have all ‘A’ talent and clients, and someone even better I comes across our transom. In that case, we’ll have to make difficult decisions on whether to replace talent or clients, or break our own rule and grow. That is a good problem to have. If we think we can add 1 or 2 employees and clients and still have fun coming to work, then we may have to revise our ‘sweet 16 rule.’

The bottom line, however, is that we’ll be busy focusing on developing the existing teams and servicing existing clients, improving retention and profitability, instead of spending cash and resources on sales and HR. I further hypothesize that Anvil’s valuation will not suffer from being a smaller high end boutique with unheard of retention and profitability. We’ve got months or years to get to this point, but at least I know where we’re going and have a decent idea of how to get there.