1/29/09

 

#WhoAmI Really? The Personal Side of Twitter

It's Thursday afternoon, and Twitter is bogging down and backing up. The 'fail whale' is being triggered as a mass of people post atypically personal information about themselves and broadcast it to all of Twitter... Why? Because @barefoot_exec invited them to using #WhoAmI.

I chimed in as well. Partly because describing myself in 140 characters was an intriguing challenge; partly because I wanted that anonymous congregation to know who I really was (even if only for a second... the massive number of incoming responses washed over and refreshed the feed almost instantaneously.)

Part of me believes that there is not a place in Social Media for personal idiosyncrasies, and that you should maintain professionalism in any venue where you may encounter business opportunities. But as Copeland mentioned in the office earlier today, 2009 may be the end of the veil between professional and personal. Companies have been checking out current and prospective employees using their online social profiles for some time, but as an employee it was just something to consider when you were letting your friends take and tag pictures on FaceBook and MySpace.

2009 might be the year where everyone admits we're human, and that in the age of complex 24/7 social networking you either need to have an unmanageable number of profiles, or you had better like the person you really are.

Labels: #WhoAmI, social media, social networking, twitter