I’m the same person wherever I go, but I behave differently in different settings. When I visit a client I make sure to dress appropriately; when I get back to the Biznet office, I run around socks and am allowed the occasional cartwheel (even Kevin has done a few!). I’m still the same person with the same skillset and accountability–but I might be more forthcoming with my quirks than in other locales.
The same is true online.
In some realms it’s appropriate to use industry jargon, in others it isn’t. On some websites, it’s okay (normal) to post photos of family, pets, and other personal things–one of them isn’t your business website! That doesn’t mean you become a different person; it’s means the level of appropriate content is different. Understanding the different social media channels and tools is critical.
For those of us who grew up using social media in it’s infancy, we remember the waves and warnings against posting inappropriate things online. We heard stories of students not getting accepted into graduate schools, or missing out on career opportunities, because they reflected themselves poorly online.
Here’s a lesson I hope you take to heart: the Internet is NOT ANONYMOUS. IP addresses are logged, files are encrypted–technical pieces of data are attached to everything you do! The Internet knows I’m typing this very blog from the Biznet office in Wixom, MI. Accurately represent your public self, responsibly.
I should hope that this post isn’t in response to what I said in my previous comment. I didn’t mean to imply that it’s OK to cross-pollinate the personal with the professional on any/all sm channels, and maybe my “trip to the zoo” example wasn’t the best example. I wouldn’t seriously want or expect to come here and see you post about a trip to the zoo unless you were somehow tying it into your professional interests, which I’m sure Shauna Nicholson could somehow find a way to do.
I think the point I was trying to make was that being too consistent can get boring for the reader. I’ve stopped reading blogs because it was like, “Oh look, here’s another post from ___ about ___. *yawn*” In industries that pride themselves on “breaking the rules” and making it a point to stand out from the crowd and this-is-how-you-do-it, I’m very surprised at how conformist some people are at displaying their nonconformity. And many are completely oblivious to this paradox.
What seems like irrelevancy at first is what keeps my attention as a reader. I’m a big fan of taking a seemingly irrelevant topic and displaying how it relates to the subject at hand. My senior project in com theory I used Disney’s The Little Mermaid to display McGregor’s management theories X and Y, and also Mead & Blumer’s theory of symbolic interactionism. (If you want to know how I did it, I’ll be more than happy to share.)
My current site I put up as a temporary outpost bridging personal & professional only until I got my “official” professional one finished. My long-standing credo is “Never put anything online you wouldn’t want your mother to see,” whether that’s professionally or personally, it doesn’t matter. Even though I consider my current site a sort of gray-area limbo, I’m still mindful of that and I literally showed it to my mom for self-assurance.
Her only complaint?
That it contains the word “damn.” *sigh*