Multiple Personalities: Balance Between Personal and Work Identities

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I previously wrote about how to manage my online reputation. My challenge was how to keep my professional and personal personalities separate. Yes, yes you can say that they are the same but there are reasons to keep them separate. For me, ths is important when  commenting on blogs for personal and company reasons. 

My company doesn’t have a corporate blog but I have this blog. Yet, part of my day-to-day job is to monitor blogs and when apppropriate comment or contact bloggers. And when I do outreach, I definitely try to abide by the rules of blogging.

For me, I feel a need to differentiate between when I comment based on my personal perspectives and as an official spokesperson of my company. Here are my Four Rules for Managing Multiple Personalities that I follow:

1. In identifying who I am on posts, I use “Cece Salomon-Lee for my company name” to identify my role as a spokesperson for my company.

2. If I’m commenting personally, I don’t use that identifier – just my name, while using my personal email and blog as ways to reach me.

3. In the content of the post, I also try to clearly outline that this is my company’s position.

4. When I email a blogger directly, I clearly send the email from my personal or work email to keep the correspondence separate.

The balance I try to keep is when a connection from my blogging or personal comments can be relevant for my day job. So far, it hasn’t been too much of an issue to keep my multiple personalities separate. What do you think? Am I being to black and white in how I manage my reputation online?