Online: Split Personalities, or Who Blogs What?

According to an article I read this morning from inbound marketers at HubSpot, there are about 900,000 blog posts written every day. Imagine the sort of variety that this enormous number represents–people blogging about themselves, their business, their families, their interests. And that doesn’t include the “I’m going to do something every day for a year, blog about it and get a book contract” people that have one of my friends feeling particularly inundated right now. Everyone has something to say.

I like to think that I have something to say as well. The problem is that the things I wish to say do not all belong in the same pot. As a matter of fact, in my case, I feel they belong in three. When I blog about work–meaning when I write about things that my customers care about–I write on the Montreat Conference Center blog. When I blog about my personal experiences and questions regarding what I do, I write (or intend to write) here. (The third category will need to remain a bit of a mystery because I am still figuring it out and hope to launch it in the future.)

OK, so maybe “who blogs what/where” is mostly cut-and-dried in my case–for right now at least. But what about other types of social media? For a while I really liked to maintain my Facebook profile for my personal life and my LinkedIn profile for my professional one. But with so many companies and colleagues on both networks, that separation now feels artificial and problematic.

Then there’s Twitter. The people I follow on Twitter are a diverse bunch, from designers to bloggers, restaurants to outdoor equipment brands, not to mention all the people who I actually know. I like to share a diverse array of information: what I’m doing, interesting things that I’ve read, great quotes from conferences in session, etc. And I worry that this diversity debases the value of my Tweets. Do I need to be more consistent as if I were marketing a “real” product or service? Where do self-branding and company marketing meet? And where do they separate?

I love to brand myself as who I am at work, and I think it’s a handy tool when it comes to making a name for yourself in the community/industry/etc. But there are also these other interests of mine that need space and voice and that qualify as part of the “self” in “self-branding.” Where do they belong? Do I need to have two “selves” in order for either branded message to maintain its value?

(photo by Shirley Buxton)