It’s been pointed out that Virginia has the highest rate of custom vanity plate use in the US. It’s probably because getting a vanity tag is so easy and cheap to do here, which has resulted in a kind of self-reinforcing vanity plate culture. However, I’ve never really been tempted to get one. Why not?

I like the idea of maintaining a state of relative anonymity while I’m inside my car, in case someone I know sees me doing something stupid while driving. As long as that person doesn’t see my face and hasn’t memorized my license plate, I have a degree of plausible deniability: “Sorry, no, I don’t recall cutting you off — it must have been some other driver in a red hatchback.” Having a vanity plate as a unique identifier removes all doubt.

However, thinking that a regular license plate gives you anonymity on the road relies on equal parts polite social fiction and self-delusion. You’re out in public, and if you want to be an anonymous, you’ll have to drive a silver Honda Accord with tinted windows and James Bond-ian rotating license plates. It’s only the fact that you’re seen by people who don’t know you that gives you limited anonymity, and that diminishes as you drive regular routes or are close to your usual destinations.

All this babble about vanity plates is just a setup for the first part of my metaphor — in the real-world, during fleeting encounters on the road, it can be easier to get away with transgressions, without having them come back at you.

In fact, unless you’re a recognizable celebrity of some sort, or someone in your immediate social circle sees you in the act, you’ve got a good deal of functional anonymity — unless you choose to identify yourself with a vanity tag, wearing a t-shirt with your name on it, proudly sport your Congressional intern badge while you’re out and about town, or leave an event with your “Hello, my name is” sticker on your shirt.

(Of course, now the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and mobile internet has changed this dynamic. But work with me on this.)

Online, of course, it’s a while ‘nother ballgame. Because of search and socially-shared status, everyone is wearing their vanity tag online. So what you do is theoretically always tied to who you are. Which means you need to be on your best behavior all the time, especially for people in business, or may be in business someday.

It’s a cliche now: the momentary lapse in judgment leads to a post that is widely spread, easily searchable, and forever archived.

I suppose this is just a way to restate the question, “Can you keep your personal persona separate from your business persona online?” and the answer remains the same: No, not really.

Without revisiting the questions about surveillance societies and personal branding and all those other issues, I think the primary takeaway is just about awareness — the relative anonymity we had is diminishing, even for those of use who don’t choose (in certain venues) to broadcast who we are. And online, it never really existed in the first place.

What do you think? Leave a comment below. (Anonymous, pseudonymous, or eponymous — your choice.)

Hoping everyone had a great Memorial Day holiday. While the purpose of Memorial Day is to commemorate the service of the men and women who have given their lives in the service of their country, I’m using it as jumping off point to think more philosophically about online memorials in general, and specifically, how our digital presences might live on without us online.

Online memorials done by the living for the lost are not new; USA Today last week had a roundup of some military-focused memorial sites and Google Earth released a Map the Fallen map to honor those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the civilian sphere, we’ve also seen funeral homes and obituary listings add guestbooks, group albums, and other forms of interactivity.

From the simplest Web page to the most elaborate official registry, online memorials make people’s achievements accessible, and the interactivity inherent in sharing memories around the dead turns static memorials into nodes for community. After all, as we know, memorials aren’t really for the dead — they’re for the living.

But What Happens to Our Stuff When We Die?
NPR had a piece last week on the death of suicide prevention pioneer Edwin Shneidman (here’s the complete LA Times audio slideshow [contains a few BS-words]). Without getting into the stickier potential discussions on theology and ontology, I’ll just focus on this quote:

“I’ll be dead. And I ‘live’ in my children, in my DNA, in my books, in my reputation.”

To the reputation and legacy bits, we can add in all the stuff that you’ve published online during your lifetime.

Historically, once you achieved a certain bit of fame or notoriety, your body of work had a pretty good chance of outlasting your body, in the pages of books, or the dusty archives of a newspaper’s morgue. If you weren’t famous, maybe you’d live on in a scrapbook, or tax records, or other documents unearthed by a future social historian looking for insight into the life of the everyday person.

With the democratizing effects of the Internet, and the changing expectations of fame and visibility, regular people now have the chance to see and shape the digital legacy that will remain accessible to others after they’re gone. That is, if we can solve that whole impermanence problem — they say that everything you publish is online, forever, but that’s an aphorism, not an archival strategy. Though you can bet that there are businesses looking to cover the needs of preserving your digital life in death, as outlined in this CNN article.

Personal Branding in the Afterlife?
Efforts to maintain your digital self after you’re gone sound suspiciously like an attempt at personal branding in the afterlife. Is there a market for online reputation management after you’re dead? All the usual advice to managing your reputation doesn’t really apply when you can’t reply (because you’re dead). You’re going to need a proxy, someone motivated by either love or money. And this is a real application of trust — after all, you’re not going to be around to check up on folks.

Worry about your digital legacy is a conceit of the living. At a certain point, though, it’s probably better to remember that on a long-enough timeframe, what you’ve done isn’t going to matter too much to people, and it’s more useful to worry about what you’re doing now, than what you’re going to be remembered for.

Are you making provisions for your legacy after you pass? Leave a comment (which will add to your digital body of work).

I think enough time — gosh, like a whole week — has gone by so we can be sufficiently clear-headed to draw wildly self-serving and far-reaching conclusions from the latest Twitter-enabled, blog-powered, marketing and PR dustup/corporate nightmare scenario. In fact, we’ve got two of them, so we can do an episode of compare and contrast: AmazonFail and the Domino’s Pizza “prank” video.

We don’t need to rehash the details of each event (though I note it’s interesting to visualize the evolution of each  story using Google News Timeline — though for the life of me, I can’t see how to permalink and share a query).

In each case, something bad happened, it went viral (with blogs and Twitter as accelerants), and there was a whole bunch of angst, sturm, drang, and swirl as each affected company was slow to respond.

* The Acceleration of the Outrage Cycle: These two latest events kind of make me look nostalgically back at the good old days of 2004, where it took days, or even weeks, for something to really blow up online (see the Kryptonite Lock controversy, which brewed up on bicycle Web forums.)

The Amazon case was apparently set off by the LiveJournal blog entry of an affected author. Between the nature of fandom and LiveJournal’s pretty good tools for disseminate blog entries among your network of friends and followers, it propagated outward at a, shall we say, rapid pace.

The Domino’s scandal was posted to YouTube. ‘Nuff said.

Lesson: You’ve got to stay on top of things and monitor at all times. And, once you pass a certain threshhold,  “all times” means “all times”: 24/7/365. So make sure you have an escalation plan for all those inconvenient nights/holidays/weekends/vacations.

* Just How Rapid Is Your Rapid Response? Amazon’s response was hobbled by the fact that things blew up on Easter Sunday, which limited their initial response to a lame, canned-sounding message from customer service. In the absence of a better response, this led the way for various attention-seekers to take (false) credit, and also allowed Amazon’s critics to attribute to malice what was later explained by stupidity (and blaming the French).

Originally, I’d thought that Domino’s had responded faster, but this Directorship article in BusinessWeek states that the leadership sat on the issue for 24 hours, not wanting to make things worse. As if.

Lesson: Trust Jack Bauer when he says, “THERE’S NO TIME!” Have contingency plans in place. No plan can cover everything, but if you have a framework and infrastructure in place, you can modify and adapt to specific situations, instead of trying to start from scratch.

Incidentally, this is also why communication and conversation is important when there isn’t a crisis — it builds credibility and networks that you can leverage when you need them.

* Respond in the Right Venue: The AmazonFail furor calmed down not when the official “ham-fisted cataloging error” statement came top-down from Amazon PR, but buttom-up, when Amazon alumni and unauthorized insiders gave enough credible detail, in the blogs, to settle people down. Bloggers were the folks with their hair on fire, so that’s where the most effective response was.

The Domino’s case is a little different, but because it blew up on YouTube, the best place to respond was on YouTube. (Sure, also maintain the forms and issue the release and update the corporate Web site if you want. It’s expected. But recognize that’s not where the influence, audience, and solution lies.)

Lesson: You got to go to the hotspots to put out the fire.

Finally, to beat on drum some more: People don’t believe corporate PR. But they do believe other people. One of two things will happen: PR folks will try to co-opt the process and come up with officially-sanctioned leaks, or they can try doing things above-board and make sure the front-line folks who actually know what’s going on get heard from.

Any other far-reaching and self-serving advice you’d like to share? Leave a comment.