Going public
by teknetia
I currently have a public Twitter account, however it is only really followed by a mixture of friends, spam bots and a few people I haven’t met but converse with online regularly. My account doesn’t have any visibility or followers from the industry I work in, meaning that it is used very openly and without much (if any) censoring of my thoughts, activities, etc.
I also feed the tweets from this account into my website as part of the design.
This has served me well so far without the need for a private account or censored feeds however I find myself in a position where I am about to embark of a few projects with various people inside and outside the industry. This means that my online personality will become much more public with the possibility of potential and current customers and partners following my streams. As much as I like to tease my industry for being very backwards when it comes to online technologies, they are slowly catching on.
This leaves me wondering the best course of action. I have a priviate account setup that I have tweeted to twice (a free beer to the first person to find it and request to follow!) however I am unsure how best to maintain the separations of life and work/projects. The options I see open to myself are as follows:
- Change my current account to private and create a new one for these new projects.
- Leave my account open and don’t mention is anywhere, using a new account for that. This has the possible problem of my account sharing the same username as my website url and therefore being easily searchable.
- Heavily censor my current account and turn it into a work style account and use my private account to converse with people (this is the least attractive option to me).
At this stage, the most attractive option is to create a new account to use for these things, however it means starting from scratch with no followers and ensuring I actually use it to converse and such with possible industry followers. It may have the best long term pay off though.
What does everything think? I know a lot of my friends are in social media so this is a very real thing for them to consider. What would you recommend or do you have another option I could consider?
Comments
Open a new account. Clean, fresh start. Your personal account is just that, personal. Keep your personal one locked down (this is what I do, I am hunting for jobs and I am very aware that one tweet taken out of context could potentially cost me a role). Clients and business contacts want to see a professional, focussed twitter stream.
Paranoid, much?
You should be….
I am in the same predicament at the moment. This is the year that I go through the process of being accredited by the government officially as a teacher in a professional capacity. I don’t think I need to even begin to explain the sort of things one can and cannot say in any sort of public capacity when they are entrusted with the care of children aged 4-18yo.
I painfully went through my twitter feed and deleted anything with even a remote hint of offense or suspicion, and have since been tweeting with this very public representation in mind. There will come a time very soon (particularly as I get teaching jobs and tech-savvy students scan the Internet for gossip on their music/drama teacher) where I’ll need to make this personal account private… but I really don’t want to do this, as I am pretty active within the Sydney Arts tweeting scene (yep, there is one… you’d be surprised how much it buzzes) and this would make being a part of that more difficult. However, for me, it seems inevitable.
The solution I’ve conjured up to assist my tweeting whatever I feel like, no matter how NSFW or whatever, is to create a parallel, personal account which bares little or no resemblance to the one I have at the moment. This, too, would be private, and I’d have to excruciatingly inform people I think might be interested in following it by DM (if I post tweets about it, a potential employer might be able to track the account and link the two together, rendering the whole idea useless). This is a really convoluted solution, but really the only one I can think of.
Maybe a different situation than yours, as I guess I’m not tweeting ‘for’ work, but that’s my 2c nonetheless.