Social Media Identities

I am one person. Or at least in real life I am one person. Online I am two persons, sometimes three, sometimes more. The number of identities depends on the website/social network.

A recent article on GigaOM, “LinkedIn and Facebook: Personal vs. Professional in the Identity Wars,” by Mathew Ingram shed a light on a few things I’ve been noticing:

- Everyone is trying to be like Facebook.
- I have separate accounts for everything.

As for the Facebook phenomenon, it is what it is. Convergence and divergence is an eternal cycle, so it’s no surprise that user interfaces and functionality on social websites are beginning to look similar. Facebook is just lucky that their model is the winner, for today.

As for the separate accounts, it is true. I have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile, several Blogger profiles, several Reddit profiles, and the list goes on. Part of the reason for the separation is that I don’t really want everyone at work to know everything about me personally and vice versa. For the people who know me personally, I wouldn’t want them to know me professionally. (Let’s just say I behave differently at work from at home.)

So if LinkedIn is trying to be more like Facebook, does this mean that our social digital identities are also converging? Digging deeper into the subject I came across some interesting research by MyWebCareer.com stating that roughly 23% of LinkedIn connections are also Facebook friends. (Press release here.) While the merits of research against a self-selecting panel of users can be debated elsewhere, the idea is interesting.

Conservatively speaking, 1 out of 5 people I “know” on LinkedIn, I also “know” on Facebook. So I’ve broken my cardinal rule, I’ve mixed professional and personal, business and pleasure. Is it so bad? I’m beginning to think not.

How often is the case that colleagues go out for drinks after work?

Or how often is it the case that colleagues with similar interests outside of work meet up on the weekends?

How about the cases where friends are freelancers, so friends offer to commission work from their friends to help them out?

The idea of self is complicated, and it changes over the course of a lifetime. So why not have my social digital identities mix a little bit? Afterall, I am the same person offline. So, now I just need to introduce my FLinkedInbook profile.