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Can You Keep Your Personal Persona Separate From Your Business Persona Online? (No.)

Over the Christmas holiday break, I was trying to do some writing for my personal blog.  And I was having a hard time of it — it’s gotten trickier for me over the years. I’m a not an over-sharer by nature, and then on top of that, throw in the couple of years I’ve been blogging for The Man (in one form or another).

Dealing with lawyers (gosh bless ‘em) is enough to make any blogger a little oversensitive — even paranoid. But they exist for a good reason. When you remember that everything you say, write, or post online, has the potential to live forever, attached to your name, only a quick Web search away, the question isn’t “Are you paranoid?” but “Are you paranoid enough?” (Example: “Seriously, you have no privacy. Get over it.“)

Topical Tripwires: High-Risk, Low-Reward

When you’re blogging in support of your small business, you’ll probably want to stay away from the Big Three topics: Sex, politics, and religion. (Maybe sports, though depending on where you are, that may be a subset of any of the big three.)

This is not to say you should be an opinionless, humorless robot… it’s just that expressing opinions on divisive topics that have no relevance to your business is a high-risk, low-reward proposition. Don’t do it unless you’re really sure it’s appropriate to your business: If you’re a sex shop, talk sex. If you run an indie coffee shop and you cater to crunchy hippie types, you can probably talk your crunchy hippie politics. For everyone else, it all depends if you’re willing to live with the consequences. If you’re in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose your customers, go wild and talk about whatever you want.

This, of course, is not a new thing, it’s just that the Internet makes it easy to find the stuff you post on your personal time. When I lived in New York City, I used a roommate finding service (this was way, way before Craigslist). Later, a local newspaper revealed the fact that the proprietor, who seemed like a nice enough guy, was also a Holocaust denier. If I had known this beforehand, I would have taken my business elsewhere.

Anyway, all that stuff, while important, isn’t the reason I have trouble blogging sometimes. Staying away from topical tripwires that’ll get you in trouble is pretty easy, once you get the flavor of it.

I Support Cat Suffrage

The more insidious censorship is self-censorship. This is because it involves vanity: How is this going to make me look? It’s about positioning, and personal branding — what will people find when they search for me, and what will they think of me when they see it?

For example, say you search on my name, and on the same results page as my insightful, even trenchant, commentaries on social media, you see that in my personal blog postings, I also firmly believe that cats should have the right to vote. Will that change your opinion of me?

That’s a relatively benign example. The major risk is that your silly throwaway blog entries distract from the “important” blog entries that are more about what you’re about.

The point of all this is that, if you’re a good transparent and authentic small business blogger, you’re posting under your own name. And unless you set up an alter ego for your personal persona online that’s completely isolated from your business persona, there’s going to be some overlap between the stuff you post when you’re on the clock, and the stuff when you’re off the clock. And because there’s no disclaimer in the world that will fix this, invariably, this means you start edging towards always being on the clock.

Again, it’s probably always been this way — it’s just that the Internet puts your personal life on the same page as your professional one. I’m still struggling with this particular dilemma — I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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