Identity Crisis
First off, hope you have a safe and memorable Memorial Day. I love this holiday weekend for several reasons…but one of them is that it is also my birthday weekend. 29. Again. Yay.
That aside, I’m wondering if others are struggling with this out there in the ‘net ether.
My name is Erin Albert, and I have a crisis of identity online.
I think I’ve spoken and written about this before, but for those of us with online identities for our day jobs, for our companies, and for ourselves, it really can become quite a menagerie of messages online. For example, I noted that some of my tweets were getting mixed up with my brands online, which ended up costing me a follower or two, simply because the wrong messages were going to the wrong audiences, unbeknownst to me.
I’ve subsequently fixed the problem with this one social media stream. However, I wish there was an aggregator where I could write the message, THEN determine which channels it should go through – without paying, without too much hassle. There are some platforms out there that manage some of this decently, but not all my identities for free. If you know of a good free tool, please hit me with it.
And generally, I’m here to tell you that if you have multiple interests as I do – work online personally, professionally, and otherwise, managing the messages online can get messy. There’s an opportunity here for someone to clean up the mess. Just not sure how yet.
Most of all, I think it is important to just be you. Stay authentic. Keep it real. Because if you start going plastic for your tribe, they’re not going to dig that at all. In fact, of late, some of the most interesting characters I’ve ran into don’t have any social media presence online. None. Nada. They quite frankly don’t like online presence. I find that fascinating.
Rock on. Hope you don’t have an ID crisis like me. But it’s an interesting problem to have in this day and age. While I struggle to figure the online world out just like everyone else, I’ll just enjoy the ride….despite having multiple channels….
