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?