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Web 2.0 creating multiple personality disorder?!

Loved Adam Arthur’s post just now about tools to manage social profiles, he suggests apps like ping.fm that have been very helpful and other new ones that I will have to try out.

But this led me to a related question: How do you manage what “profile” to take on for any given tool / purpose?

For example, I manage the GovPartner Twitter account, so I have to write as a company representative on there, often times sharing info on behalf of our clients, similar to a press release. So that’s very much a “work” profile where I also merge in messages from our staff and business partners. Then of course I have my own Twitter profile “Gabriela Dow” very much neglected, and then another account for local non-profit / fun work I do here in San Diego, classes we put together with friends (FriendsWClass). Hootsuite really helped to manage all three of these Twitter accts, sometimes a GovPartner message would be applicable to share via the other accounts.

Then there is Facebook… strictly a personal account, no “work friends” on there because I’m not sure clients need to know that I am working on their case study at midnight or see photos of my little guys running around at the beach…

And GovLoop ends up being a mix of “official” company info and some more of the personal insight….

But it ends up being a strange experience to sit down for the 20 minutes or so per day that I have to catch up on these sites… or throughout the day, I’ll make a serious corporate Twitter post, a funny comment on FB, try to add helpful info here, Tweet again about a Habitat fundraiser in SD for the weekend, another Tweet about an e-Gov project, upload a photo of my 2 yr old with pants falling down on the water feature at Legoland… back to answering an agency question via direct message on Twitter…

I do a lot of updating via my Blackberry while out and about and I swear I am going to end up accidentally posting a personal joke on the GovPartner site one day, or send my friends in Spain an e-Gov case study… que?

Anyone else feel like you’ve got the on / off personal / business switch to deal with and have gotten them mixed up?

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Aisha Jordan

i def. have that switch! my twitter is for multimedia & business stuff and my fb is personal (but still heavily sprinkled with multimedia and personal biz stuff). some of it i do have to put through a mental filter before i post (and as useful as it is, Ping.fm is making it a bit harder), but i’m getting used to it. lol – i do understand the multiple personality issues!

Ted McLaughlan

No kidding – in fact, I and some collaborators decided to coin a new word at one point, an “avonym“, as a representative, multi-purpose personal identifier reused across social media and other virtual contexts (when your “real” name simply wasn’t good enough)…

Gabriela Dow

Love the term “avonym” – though I have to say that my professional postings are lightened up a bit and maybe more enjoyable given that I am also updating the personal sites as well 🙂