Split internet personalities

Marketing experts like telling everyone that your personal brand is important. If you want to make it “out there” or on the internet, you need to develop a strong brand that represents you and that makes you look good.

I don’t buy into their LinkedIn propaganda a 100% but I do realize that it’s important to have some sort of online presence. The problem is I can never agree with myself what that should look like. I have considered a multitude of formulas, of what this “online me” should look like. Not that I have split internet personalities or anything.

The core problem is that if you want to create a “good” personal brand there should be a focus or even a “niche”. You are good at one thing and everyone should know you for that one thing! And that works great in theory, until you end up being me. And you’re interested in way too many things to just create one. To solve this I’ve bought close to a hundred domain to split everything up in neat projects – which I never worked on – but that didn’t help with my personal brand.

After some consideration I’ve decided to split my personal brand in two parts:

  • My “Professional” Personal Brand
  • My “Personal” Personal Brand

I chose this split because it’s the easiest separation to make. My “Professional” brand will be reserved for anything that’s related to my job and the little adventures I have while working. My “Personal” brand is for everything else.

Of course you’ll notice some overlap between the two. I work in tech because I am very fond of technology. I am hacking in my free time and at work because I find it interesting. I might be programming on my time off as I’m doing during my job. But this separation will make it a little easier to decide what goes where. Everything that is directly related to my career goes to my Professional brand. All other shenanigans are my own under my “Personal Brand”

And if something could fall under both… Well, then there’s something else to worry about!

I have already setup two separate blogs and two twitter accounts but I need to do some window dressing for all the accounts. I’m sure people will discover them all organically if they want to complain about what I do during my job / time off. People are pretty good at that sort of thing.

buzzwords!

If you’ve made it so far in this blog, congratulations. This blog post is brought to you by my autistic need to do everything “just right” even if it makes me look like an idiot. Who announces he’s “splitting up internet brands”? Most people who worry about this sort of thing just post on LinkedIn about how amazing you are. And yet you are here, still reading this. If you’ve made it this far, I challenge you to go to Twitter and tweet “buzz buzz!” at me. Because the difference between a Personal and a Professional brand. Personal brands are far more fun!

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