LifeStream I’m breaking up with you

This is a quick follow-up to my last blog post. I know what I’ve needed to do for some time now, but have been procrastinating. LifeStream, I’m breaking up with you. While you save me time and simplify my life, your methods aren’t conducive to properly maintaining my personal brand. From now on, I’ll use Twitter to update Twitter, LinkedIn to update LinkedIn and Facebook to update Facebook. If someone wants to reach me on AIM, you can do so by messaging me at melaniestack111. Goodbye LifeStream, it’s been fun.

My Personal Brand Has a Split Personality…

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I’m going to try to use my blog as a space to reflect my personal thoughts, not professional thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and have a great career but I’ve always struggled with where to draw the work/personal line in the sand. So excuse me as I reflect a little bit on how exactly to do just that.

As a business development professional I am in the business of building relationships. I’m a connector.  I introduce great companies to great PR people and watch great things come out of it.  I’m fully aware that every interaction I make with a potential client and current clients must be a valuable one to demonstrate that not only are the account team members knowledgable, but that I am too.

Great, but what happens as my prospects and clients start to friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter and ask me why I haven’t checked in on FourSquare lately?  At a previous job I built my personal brand online because my company didn’t have a Twitter handle or blog, so I acted as an extension of the company’s marketing initiatives and became an expert in their space.  But now, my company has a Facebook page and Twitter handle, one managed by  a team of staffers and the other managed by one of our principals.  So, now what?  Since most of my interactions with prospects are confidential, I can’t really say what I’m doing at any given time on the social networks and  most of the time, I don’t want Twitterland, FourSquare or Facebook friends to know what I’m doing or where I am on a professional level, because I don’t want my competitors to know my strategy and who I could be talking to.   So, if I can’t talk about our strategies publically or tell people where I’m going and what I’m up to professionally…how do I effectively build a professional personal brand?  All I’m left with is my true personal brand, myself. Can you see why I feel like my personal brand has a split personality?

So should I break up with tools like LifeStream, which updates my AIM, Twitter (which updates my LinkedIn,) and Facebook all at the same time and use each social network separately yet strategically?  Let’s face it, my husband, family and friends don’t really want to learn about SEO, PR and marketing and my prospects and clients could care less that my road trip home from my sister-in-laws house took 5 hours longer than it should have.

I’m curious, how do you manage your professional brand and personal brand?  Where do you draw your line in the sand?