Do You Suffer From Internet Schizophrenia?

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Do you suffer from Internet Schizophrenia?

I do.

Well, technically speaking, I suffer from Internet DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder - but somehow it’s not quite as catchy a name although some of my personalities might think differently.

If you’ve been online for any length of time, created a few websites or blogs, have an account with Flickr, Last.fm, Google, MySpace or any of the social media sites, the chances are you also suffer from Internet Schizophrenia.

You have multiple online identities.

On the face of it, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but what happens when you launch a new project that is totally unrelated to your regular online activities? If you use your current online moniker, will the new project water down your existing brand?

Let’s also throw into the mix the fact that your online personalities are now starting to affect your offline life.

What can you do?

As you may have guessed by now, this is the conundrum that I am currently facing. I’m in the process of starting up a new website and am agonising over what name I use to both write with and also to promote the site. This problem is further compounded by the fact that I have my fingers in a number of different pies, both on and offline.

I’m Mike the actor. I’m Mike the independent film maker. I’m Mike the voiceover artist. I’m Mike the cricket blogger. I’m Mike the cricket player. I’m Mike the web developer. I’m Mike the part-time SEO. I’m Mike the writer. I’m Mike the director. I’m Mike the generous lover.

If you were to look at the Google results for my name, you would find all of the above. Well, all apart from the last one

Why is this a problem? Well I had a situation last year where I attended a casting for a low budget film and the casting director had Googled me before the audition. We were chatting about the film when he suddenly started talking to me about his website and wanted my opinion on what he could do to improve it. He’d seen that I did websites and picked up, presumably from this site, that I also knew a bit about SEO. He was more interested in how I could help him jazz up his site than he was about my suitability for the role. Needless to say, by the time I did my audition piece, I was completely unprepared and didn’t get the role.

On the flip side of that, I lost out on a web development project a couple of years ago because the company had also Googled me, saw that I was an actor and were worried that I’d bugger off at the drop of a hat as soon as a decent acting role came in. They said they didn’t think I would be able to commit to the project.

So there’s the first part of the problem. As someone who publishes content online, should you use your real name or come up with a pseudonym? Your online activities could come back and smack you in the face. I talked about this nearly two years ago in my post How a blog search could cost you your dream job and, in Nostradamus fashion, I predicted this:

However, as with every struggling actor, I also need to do other work to keep food on the table so I can imagine that any prospective employer for a regular job would take one look at the SERPS and question my statement that “I’m 100% committed to this corporate company, Mr Big Cheese, and of course I won’t piss off as soon as an acting role comes up”

One, Two, How Many You?

Yummy mummy Ann Smarty wrote a post over at Search Engine Journal the other week about online identity theft.

Someone has most probably used your original well-branded name to register an account at a number of less known user-generated sites and talk to people online on your behalf.

The post is all about the problems of people stealing your online brand via the plethora of social networking sites. It’s an interesting read and the link to UsernameCheck is worth it’s weight in gold. However when reading the article it finally hit home to me just how badly I suffered from Internet Schizophrenia and all of the problems associated with it.

I have a number of different online personas. For example, on Digital Point I’m known as Actor Mike whereas on Digg I’m known as MikeyBee but on StumbleUpon and Sphinn I’m known as BigPond. All of these ‘people’ have different personalities, likes, dislikes and interests. The BigPond on Sphinn, for example, likes a different set of sites to the BigPond on StumbleUpon. The Mikey Bee on Digg is a very different Mikey Bee to the one on Beer In The Evening.

As I’ve blundered my way through the Internet over the last 10 years, I have created hundreds of accounts on hundreds of different websites and it’s only now that I can see the mistake I’ve made. I guess the explosion of social media sites over the last few years is what has brought it home to me.

Online Branding

If you read any of the blogs about Internet marketing, you’ll know just how important it is to establish an online brand. Once you’ve got your brand, you reinforce it by using your avatar on all of the social networking sites, dropping it into forum and email signatures and championing your brand at any given opportunity. You become known by your online brand and build up trust, or otherwise, as a result.

I didn’t have a clear objective about who I wanted to be when I set out and, as a result, now have dozens of user names out there associated with a vastly differing range of topics. As I said above, I have used the same user name with the same avatar for some wildly disengaged topics. With the wonder of hindsight, I can see that perhaps a better way of doing things would have been to create very specific online personas for each of my activities.

Or would it? Surely the hassle of maintaining multiple personalities online is counter productive? I mean, isn’t the whole idea of publishing online about expressing your personality? People buy into the person behind the blog or website so by creating a false persona, are you not cheating people? Also how do you keep tabs on which head you’re wearing at that moment in time? Am I the tech head at 9:50am on this particular Thursday or am I the golf enthusiast?

By creating multiple online identities, are you not setting yourself up for a fall? The counter to that is that by maintaining a singular identity, are you not spreading yourself too thin and reducing your authority?

There is no one size fits all approach to picking an online identity.

Or is there?

Online vs Offline Smackdown

So there are the two elements that I’m looking at today.

1. Should you use your real name to publish online?
2. Should you use multiple identities online?

The answer to the question is…it depends.

Jeremy Schoemaker is best known to bloggers as ShoeMoney. You’ll have seen the ShoeMoney logo all over the web. He uses it well to reinforce the brand he has created. When he launches a new project, he’ll use the ShoeMoney name as almost a quality stamp of approval. Now this works fantastically well for someone like Jeremy because he doesn’t have an offline life. I don’t mean that he has no life apart from the Internet - he has a wonderful family - but his business IS the Internet so appearing in the SERPs as ‘Jeremy Schoemaker’ isn’t an issue to him. If someone searches for him by name, it’s because they want to find Jeremy Schoemaker AKA ShoeMoney.

Likewise Darren Rowse (AKA ProBlogger), Rae Hoffman (AKA Sugarrae), Michael Gray (AKA Graywolf), Brian Clark (AKA Copyblogger), Seth Godin (AKA…ermm…Seth Godin). These people all run a business online either directly or indirectly. Their brand is their name. Their chief income is generated via online commerce so to appear in the SERPs by either their real name or by their Internet username isn’t a problem.

However things aren’t always as cut and dried. I have my reasons for distancing my offline life from my online life and there’s a very good chance that you do too and you’re not alone.

Let’s look at a different example. I’ve been chatting with Blog Bloke via email and blog comments for the last couple of years but I have no idea what his real name is. I have an inkling that his parents didn’t give him that name. For whatever reason, Blog Bloke has chosen the path of online anonymity.

Equally Maki from Dosh Dosh. As far as I know, Maki has never revealed his last name and, for all I know, Maki might not be his real first name either. I know that Everton Blair from Connected Internet uses a completely fictitious name to protect his offline identity because of his job at a UK ISP.

I’ve written about the case of Abby Lee/Zoe Margolis before. As the result of having her anonymity being blown by an unscrupulous journalist, Zoe found she could no longer get any work in the film industry because of the stigma attached to her sex blog. As its worked out, losing her anonymity has led to a book deal, a number of media opportunities and regular TV appearances but I’m sure that she would rather her family and friends had found out about her online alter ego a different way.

Going back to the whole Internet Schizophrenia thing, Zoe knows me through yet another Internet persona I used to write a blog some time back.

So as we can see, the whole issue of picking an online persona is a complex one. Do you use your real name? Do you use a pseudonym? If you use your real name, does your online persona clash with your offline one? In some cases, if you use a pseudonym you may lose the trust of your readers.

Once you’ve picked a name, do you use the same one for all of your online activities? What if you write about technology but you’re also a regular contributor to a forum about dogging? What if you maintain numerous sites about a wide range of topics? If you’re using social media to promote your websites, should you create multiple accounts for each of your online activities? After all, the tech head wouldn’t Stumble the same sites as the dogger, would they?

So after nearly two thousand words, you can see why I’ve been agonising over the choice of name I use on my new project!

I’m going to have a lie down now because my head hurts so it’s over to you to contribute to the confusion in the comments. What strategy do you use? Are you equally as confused? Have you had your online life make an unwelcome appearance in your offline life?

Tagged as: Internet, social media