Identity Crisis
Author: Katie
This is a topic that has come up in my own work recently:
In any given social media account; who are you?
It seems like a silly question but if you think about it, it’s critical. If you’re the person with the responsibility to be the personal voice of a company or brand, then who are you really? Are you still John Smith, a PR rep at XYZ corp, or are you XYZ corp, or are you some fictional manifestation of XYZ corp?
I read an interesting take about personalities on Twitter by Shea Beck last week and some musings by popular industry bloggers, like Jeremiah Owyang, regarding the level of personal content in their tweets. It all got me thinking about online identity in greater detail.
[Note: while most of the inspiration for this post comes from Twitter and the account setup on that network, keep in mind that it can apply anywhere: branded Facebook fan pages, brand accounts on popular forums, corporate blogs, anywhere where you are talking in a personal capacity on behalf of a brand or on behalf of your personal brand.]
There are several models for the branded online personality:
- Person first, brand second. This would be an account where the avatar is the actual person, the name includes the person’s name and then the bio or second half of the user name is the brand.
- Brand first, person second. In this case the avatar would be the logo, the profile name is the brand and somewhere in the bio it mentions who the actual person is that is responding from the account.
- Brand only. This is when the whole thing is branded and there is no mention of an actual person.
- Brand mascot. An account where a fictional personality represents the brand, they’re the avatar, the account name and whoever is writing is pretending to be that person. Jack from Jack in the Box is a great example of this.
So what model works best? I think it varies depending on the brand. But the rule on how to decide what is right for your brand never changes: Choose the one that will make your purpose clear to the community. By reading your name and/or profile I should get a good idea of what being friends with you means. If you present yourself as an individual person who is going to share interesting information and then I follow you and find out it’s all branded messaging, that’s not going to make me happy. At the same time if I follow a brand and get a bunch of personal messages or my feed is full of personal photo albums, I’m going to be pretty confused.
How you clarify your online identity (whether that be for a brand or for yourself):
1. Identify the purpose of the account. Is it for keeping up with friends, talking about business, talking about a particular business, or a mix of several things.
2. Think about how to describe that purpose using the bio/profile picture/any other fields available. Is it about you or the brand? Is about your personal life or professional career? If it’s more than one thing, highlight the main objective and describe the secondary objective later.
Disclaimer: Just because you create a separate business/brand account as well as a personal one doesn’t mean you can say whatever you like in the personal one and think that it’s anonymous (it’s not – even if you try to make it that way, there’s a very good chance it will somehow come back around to you.) You still have to utilize basic social skills.
This is my recipe for online identity, what do you think? How should we present our identity online in situations where we may be representing more than just our personal selves?
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katie, thanks for taking this conversation one step father. I like your Disclaimer at the end too.
At my company – right now I am using the Brand first, person second. But I think that is causing me to get fewer “re-follows” on Twitter compared to when I was brand only. I am still testing but that is just my initial thought.
I’m using the brand first, person second at Sitewire as well – I haven’t kept track of the refollows to see if they changed much post adding my name to the bio so let me know what you find out from that in the future. I have noticed that @replies and conversations have grown since I put my name on it, but that might be just because I feel more comfortable interacting as myself with my own voice than I did when I was trying to “be” Sitewire. Keep me updated on anything you learn through your efforts.
[12:12:22 PM] Nagasunder Sharanappa: Start counting the number of social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Technorati you have your profile with? You could have at least ten; half of them would be different from each! Have a unique profile to establish online identity. Manage your online identity by creating a profile using Google vanity URL. It will be one cohesive place for all your online profiles and it can get indexed by Google easily.Consecutively you can sign up with Crederity to get your identity verified online to avoid identity crisis.
Thanks for the tip on Crederity – looks interesting
Katie,
I wanted to thank you for the comment on my post the other day, and also give you kudos for this one.
Do you find that most of the people you’re following talk primarily about social media, or do you build a network with mixed interests. I know someone was talking about using multiple twitter accounts based on the network (friends, SM, company, etc) at Agencyside, just didn’t know if that was you or what your position was. Just curious. Again, thanks for taking the time to comment and I’m looking forward to more of your insight.
-RM
@ryancmiller
Ryan,
Thanks for the kudos! To answer your question, the only time I recommend more than one account is when you’ve got a very clear business v. personal line to draw. For example, I tweet for Sitewire and that’s all business, and I tweet for myself, and that’s a mix of talking shop and my personal life. I would never have more than one personal account, like one for talking shop and the other for personal updates and another for movie reviews – I think that would dilute the effectiveness of your network. Go with your gut and do what’s natural. It’s the same as how you would act at a party. You might be in a group of friends and they start talking about a subject you don’t really have interest in, so you tune out for a while, maybe talk to someone else. Then you hear them mention something that you know a little bit about, so you tune back in and contribute your thoughts. I think Twitter works the same. I follow some people based on what they normally tweet about, and every once and a while they get off on tangents, and that’s fine. But the Bio should give me a good idea of what to expect.
Personally most of the people I follow are related to social media because I’m on Twitter the most from work. But I do have other interests and those are definitely represented in what I tweet and the kinds of people I follow. If you use something like TweetDeck or Seesmic, you can group the people you follow by type so you know where to look for what, but it still keeps it all in one view (Facebook allows you to sort your feed like this as well.) This way you can keep your network broad and reach the most people, but narrow your focus when you need to.
Thanks for the commment! Let me know if this made sense,
Katie
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