Personal vs professional: where do you draw the line online?
After skipping last week’s #markchat due to the Pike River memorial, the Twitter stream will once again be flowing freely at 12:30pm today, with the topic being ‘personal authenticity vs professional brand – where do they meet and diverge?’ Also, for all those unable to ‘attend’ the chat, we’ll choose the five most salient/interesting comments made during #markchat and a link to the summary blog post.
We all have perceptions about ourselves that aren’t necessarily what we would want them to be. Think you’re known for being really creative? Maybe you are. Or maybe you’re known for being really resourceful, but lacking the spark that generates relevant ideas.
Either way, how others perceive you is, ultimately, very important when it comes to your business life. Whether you like it or not, your personal brand impacts heavily on your business brand, whatever sector you’re operating in. This is especially true for those of us who operate at least part of the time in the online marketing world.
So, have you ever gone back and re-read your personal tweets, Facebook or LinkedIn updates from the last month? And, if you blog, have you taken a look at what the content of the few months of blog posts has been like? I thought it wise to take a look and see whether it gave the impression I would want to project.
To use the example of Twitter, I separated my updates into the following categories:
- @’s where I was asking or answering questions to people in my network
- Re-tweets
- Independent updates where I wasn’t asking or answering questions (this consisted mainly of my own, self-absorbed musings)
- Sharing personal links (i.e. those related to Bullet PR or other associations I’m involved with like Social Media Club)
- Sharing other links to sites on the web with which I have no relationship
NB – I excluded #markchat updates as there were so many and I felt this would skew the results
My updates since the start of November have been largely @’s to others asking or answering questions (40 percent of tweets), followed by sharing personal links (22 percent). I tend not to re-tweet or do independent updates unless I believe they have real value to my followers and it’s something that would therefore add to my personal brand’s reputation.
We want to hear your views on how you’re personal online brand represents your business brand and whether it’s been a conscious decision on your part to create it in a certain way.
- #markchat is this Thursday at 12.30pm NZ time.
What do you think?