I contain multitudes: how many personas do you have?

Although I’ve been involved in online comunity since the 80’s, and have been creating and managing social media programs for 4 years,  I haven’t really been part of the public social media conversation until now. This means that my social media footprint has been primarily over in our company’s subject matter domain (virtualization). My sadly-neglected blog About virtualization. My Twitter account 2,000 followers, all who want to hear about virtualization. Comments sprinkled all over the blogosphere, all about virtualization.

But now I want to start sharing what we’ve learned about social media and start comparing notes with my peers. So shoudl I start tweeting about best practices in setting up a blogging program to my virtualization crowd? That doesn’t compute.

Balancing personas & social media channels

We’re at a point in the evolution of social media and online communities where attention and development are very centralized into just a few services. We’re all supposed to be on Facebook and have one Facebook account. Although FB is trying their hardest to give us ways to separate our friends and our conversation, it’s still a challenge to manage. People have different strategies for dealing with the centralized channels: one of my colleagues saves Facebook for the personal and uses Twitter for work. Some use the Selective Twitter App on Facebook to avoid spamming their family and friends with the often geekier and much noisier Twitter conversation. For dealing with Twitter, the 80-20 rule seems to be popular as a guide for mixing your business and nonbusiness personas in one channel.

I think there will actually be a swing back to niche communities to hold our various specialized conversations and personas. This idea is not original to me; @digiphile was attributing the idea to @chrisbrogan and @pgillin the other day, citing Ning. But all you have to do is look at the difference in conversation between Adobe Photoshop’s Facebook Page and the dedicated Photoshop Community to see how weak a general channel like Facebook can be for a niche conversation. The dedicated community has more and higher quality discussions — about 30 per day vs 1 per day on Facebook — even though the Facebook page has 300,000 fans.

But even if platforms like Facebook do successfully create the tools that will allow us to segment our conversations, along with niche community sites for our every interest, that still leaves us with the problem of what to do with a service like Twitter that has kept it simple on purpose. What do I do with my 2,000 virtualization enthusiasts?

All that was a very long preamble to introducing my new bad-ass social media self: John Mark Troyer. There were two reasons I’m now JMT and you’re reading this at johnmarktroyer.com.

1. I’ve used jtroyer for decades as my usual account id and email address. My email address is jtroyer@vmware.com. My Twitter account is @jtroyer. That means that all my virtualization droppings all over the Internets are from jtroyer. Googling jtroyer right now pretty much is all Twitter tools and virtualization comments. I hope people will be Googling for my social media work, and all that virtualization jtroyer content is going to interfere with that.
2. My given first name? John Mark. I was John Mark at home until middle school, and my family still calls me that. My dad passed away a few years ago, and in one of our later conversations he shared with me that he felt God told him that I should be named John Mark. How can I argue with that?
3. John Mark is kind of unusual, which I like. Oddly enough, social media does have another @johnmark that I know, but he’s more of an open source guy, so I think the world will be big enough for the two of us.

So as of now I’m switching my professional name in the social media area over to John Mark Troyer. Changing some parts of my public profile are too late (Facebook vanity URL). Some things can be changed (LinkedIn public profile URL). And I just set up a new Twitter account — @johnmarktroyer seemed a bit limiting with only 140 characters to work with, so you can start following me on Twiter as @jmtroyer. Now all I need is a new avatar and I’ll be good to go.