Who are you?

Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration looks at the issue of multiple personas.

A theme I found interesting at this week’s Tweetcamp London 2011 was the separation of public and personal personas.

Regular users of social media tools often distinguish between their professional and personal personalities.

Tools like LinkedIn and Twitter are often used for professional networking and/or because they are inherently public forever for their ‘public’ persona.  You have to maintain a certain discretion and consistency in the public face that you show to the outside world. On the other hand people generally seem to be using tools like Facebook to maintain a personal persona (if there is such a thing) and to keep a strict distinction and privacy between the two.

If you are in the kind of role where your personal and professional persona overlap, this may not be such an issue; but for people who are working in traditional corporations, this is likely to be an increasing trend and people need to make sure that they have set any personal media, any personal persona, behind sufficiently strict privacy controls so that it doesn’t interfere with their professional one – and vice versa.

Whether this will lead to a form of online multiple personalities we will see. Some professional Tweeters are already juggling multiple twitter personals that are relevant to a range of brands or customer segments they are communicating with. But then, aren’t we all a little different with our families to the way we are with our friends or work colleagues? Perhaps this just makes it more explicit.

If you are a second year student at University, for example, you might want to think about your privacy settings before you start making job applications. Many recruiters are already routinely checking your online presence as part of their screening process. [Ed: we think that Kevan probably put this one in just for his University aged son, whose Facebook profile is colorful in the way that only a student profile can be!.]

I would like to continue that Tweetcamp discussion: how do you juggle multiple online personas?