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Balancing Personal and Professional: Your Online Brand
By Kristen Abell, Guest Blogger
Social media has brought us a long way in terms of the personal brand, but one of the challenges that it has brought with it is the distinction between personal and professional. When I first started dabbling with social media, I had Facebook for friends and family, my blog for friends and whoever else found it, and Twitter for the great unknown. As I have fine-tuned my use of these tools, I have found that these simple separations between media have begun to overlap – my colleagues and family have found me on Facebook and Twitter, the students with which I work have begun to follow me on various sites, and all of the above are now reading my blogs. As you can imagine, this has caused me to make a few changes to how I represent myself online. To Separate or Not to Separate? Whether or not you choose to keep separate personal and professional identities online, there are pros and cons for each. Obviously, it is easier to maintain a strictly professional identity if you are not mixing it up with status updates for or messages from family and friends. But how authentic can you be if you do not let at least some of your personal updates into this identity? And using social media is all about that – authenticity. The other negative to this is the time and organization it takes to keep up with two identities. For a while, I also kept a Twitter account for my five-year-old son (his updates tended to be far more entertaining than mine). But I can’t tell you the number of times I posted one of his updates as my own, or one of my updates as his because I was switching back and forth between accounts. Granted, the tools are better now, but having two separate accounts/identities is something you need to be highly organized in order to maintain. On the flip side, if you choose to consolidate, you may feel that you cannot be as authentically you as you’d like to be. Depending on your career field, the amount of leniency employers will have toward your online identities will vary. I work in higher education – there is a certain amount of flexibility I have with what I can post online. No, I don’t post drunken pictures or inappropriate comments, but I do talk candidly about myself and my family in my blog – a blog that a number of colleagues read. I also find that I’m extremely comfortable sharing this amount of information about myself – there is very little that I write about on my blog that I would not share with the people reading it face-to-face – this is a good rule of thumb when posting information online. Picture the most critical person who will read your update/post (your boss? your mom? your grandmother even?) and picture yourself telling them that same thing in a conversation. If you feel uncomfortable, maybe that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be posting that. Possibly the best thing you can do when planning to job search (or long before) is to identify your boundaries – how much are you willing to share with an employer? How can you maintain authenticity while being professional? While I think it’s important to share a little of your personal life, it’s up to you to set appropriate boundaries for yourself and your friends. Take a look around and see how other professionals in the career to which you aspire manage to do it (if they’re online). Most importantly, take the time to figure a balance between personal and professional that works for you. About the Author  Kristen Abell has been working in student affairs for almost ten years in a variety of positions at the University of Kansas, University of Georgia and most recently at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she serves as the Associate Director of Residential Life. Over that time, she has developed a niche in the area of technology and student affairs. She has served as a consultant for her division at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in updating their online presence, as well as provided guidance to NASPA Region IV-West (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education) in creating and developing online communication strategies. Kristen has been blogging for over four years, and she currently maintains two blogs (Kristendom and Kristendom Talks Tech) in addition to her work on the Student Affairs Women Talk Tech collaborative blog and her guest posts on other sites. Kristen has presented to students, staff and faculty and written on a number of different areas focusing mainly on the use of online technology in student affairs and social media.Is this helpful? Please let us know in the comments your thoughts on this as well as other ways we can help you with your career and training. blog comments powered by Disqus |