Developing a Digital Strategy 017 – Personal versus Professional Identity Online
Do you go online for your company or for yourself? Do you keep them separate or are they the same thing? Your personal identity and your professional identity are different things although they may appear to be the same.
For example: you may be a manual therapist with your own practice and also interested in health related social media sites, or you may be an employee of a larger organisation such as publishing but also interested in developments of new technologies for publishing (or something completely unrelated).
Your work profile is one thing, your personal profile is another and keeping your personal identity is important online – what happens when you leave the company, sell the practice, change careers and retrain, if you only have one profile you will have to build up who you are online from scratch.
How does this work in practice? Some sites you join will be for your personal profile (for example my dreamingspires identity on twitter, or my blog here) is essentially for me and what I record here is a repository of information for me to go back to and refer to while I’m working, it also identifies who I am and what my interests are.
Work identities, on the other hand may change. So if you are managing social media accounts for your ‘professional self’ or for a company keep in the back of your mind that you may leave, sell the business but still want to keep your individual identity when that happens.
Loading ...
Interesting post Heidi,
This is a continous struggle for me and a mental challenge sometimes
For me this helps the most: “what happens when you leave the company, sell the practice, change careers and retrain, if you only have one profile you will have to build up who you are online from scratch.” As a manual therapist involved in more than two procjets 
I need to keep this in mind all the time, and it is still confusing. I have to say that managing multiple YouTube accounts for the different projects is a challenge….where is the ‘professional I’ in all this?
Please keep posting on this topic as I guess it is (will be) an interesting topic for alot of health professionals working in the private clinic market.
[Reply]
Heidi Allen Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 7:44 am
Hi Vegard – you’re right, this is a challenge, and what I’ve seen of your work and what you’re planning you’re doing it really well. I will have a think about how I can best define personal vs professional some more.
I use two YouTube accounts – one for me – personal (Dreamingspires) where I save, upload and tag various videos on education, health, fun, social media etc) and one professional for BodyInMind – for videos and presentations relating to pain research and similar topics.
I guess you would be looking at resources for clinicians as well as patients.
[Reply]
Vegard Ølstørn Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 7:57 am
I would have liked to have one Google account where I could manage different channels with different headings/names. But as far as I have seen, this is not possible nor planned for the future.
It might be the language barrier but by Personal you still mean the “Professional Personal”? As for my Personal YouTube I put Bob The Builder (for my son), U2 Live from San Diego, Radiohead There-There — as for my “Professional Personal” I put manualtherapy things, lectures, inspirations as f.ex your great Feedly tutorial. And for the “Professional Business” account I put ergonomic product stuff.
[Reply]
Heidi Allen Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 8:05 am
It would be great to have one account to manage the different channels – but you’re right, it doesn’t exist! One way round it would be to use different browsers – I’ll write about it.
I like your definitions
Personal – anything goes
Personal professional – interesting stuff related to what you do clinically
Professional Business – purely focused on the client
Some people only have two accounts : personal which will also include some personal-professional stuff (like mine does)
and Professional Business. For what you are doing it makes sense to have three. You don’t have to maintain all three regularly – use the first two as a bookmarking repository of interesting stuff you want to keep. The Business one you will build for your client’s as you are building your business.
I think you’ve inspired some blog posts for me to write!