Persona / Identity Management on Social Networks

It’s been a while since I updated my Facebook profile, and seen all of the changes they’ve made to the privacy interface.  It was definitely time for an update to my popular slideshare presentation on Identity Management.  Not merely because of the Facebook changes, but also because of an interesting chat I had with Cary Cherniss, from Rutgers’ Organizational Psychology Department.  I needed to focus more on the concept of Persona to represent the facets of one’s self; that it was well understood in psychology that people had one identity, but our different behaviors in different situations was attributable to the Persona concept.

I also have had some good conversations with IBMers, most of them say that Facebook is purely for personal use, and LinkedIn and Xing are for professional use (you know, like your resume).  I disagree.  When you represent yourself on the Internet, in any form, you have added to your aggregate online profile.  The moment someone Googles you, they find all of that content and will not judge it in the context of personal versus professional.  One Identity, even if you think they should differentiate your personas.

So I’ve taken to updating the presentation, now called Digital Persona Management for IBMers.  It still starts with useful guidance on the theory of persona management, but I’ve redone the Facebook section entirely, and I’m starting on LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter later this week.  I’d like to have it done in time for Lotusphere – we’ll see.  Though focused on the IBMer, a technology/knowledge worker, the guidance is useful to anyone.  In the early days, there were so many requests to share with family members that it only made sense to post it externally.  I hope you find it useful, too.

The LinkedIn and Twitter sections are going to be particularly interesting, as they make it harder to differentiate your personas.  LinkedIn, for example, is classically used to host your resume; but our sellers are encouraged to maintain a profile that reflects their IBM role and objectives – that doesn’t fit well with job seeking.  Twitter doesn’t enable you to split your posts between groups (thing Google+ Circles or Facebook Friend Lists, if you haven’t seen the presentation yet), and your content is either 1:world or 1:1.  This should be interesting, and I’m looking forward to diving into these problems.