There’s a lot of forces that factor into what I do online, from my day job, expectations from the market, personal relationships and client relationships. In fact, I have some specific rules about how I blog, and even how I tweet. This last glorious weekend of sun and surf, I gave up just talking about web strategy, and extended the discussion to my personal life.
What’s interesting is that people react differently to me when I share my personal life (I am an individual, despite that I’ve dedicated most of my life to my career and family). I like Rex’s take, who had enough, and was thoughtful enough to say he didn’t want to hear about my personal life on Twitter. What’s important to me, may not be important to him, and I get that.
There’s a couple of potential solutions:
1) Do what I want, and tweet about what’s important to me during work, and what’s important to me after work. Battlestar Galactica and @goodboyrumba and all.
2) Just make my Twitter account for business and create a separate one for personal (more and more of my family is joining Twitter)
3) Wait for Twitter to offer permission based tweets around our different facets of our persona (work vs personal vs public).
It’s quite the conundrum. When I asked folks on Twitter, how much personal should I share, it was pretty even split. Some want to know more about the man behind web strategy, some just want all web strategy signal. On the other hand, we teach companies to show a bit of their human side to the market –but no one cares about what you ate for lunch.
I’m going to throw this one back to you, the readers, and do be honest. How much of my personal life do you care to hear from folks you’ve come to rely on for business information? Perhaps the bigger question is, how much of our personal lives should we share with our work? Is there a difference?
Update: Rex has a new blog post, All work makes Jack a dull boy, he’s read many of the comments on my post and his, for the most part we’re in agreement: mixture is needed, but better tools could help those filter content.
I agree with John Troyer, who talks about the 80/20 rule (business/personal). I apply the exact same approach with Twitter and as he says the opposite approach for Facebook. I can choose to filter those tweets that I’m not interested in or have time for during the day. For those people I follow faithfully for their business perspective, knowing a little of the personal side of them allows me some insight into their view of the world.
I agree that it should be a mix of both your personal and business life in one’s tweets. I think its great to get to know the personalities of people who you follow mainly for their blogs and that some of the insights you gain via their personal tweets help in the business sense as well. I.e if you’re deciding on which VC’s to go with, the personality type of your board is an important factor. Another would be when pitching to VC’s, structuring your pitch with a tinge of insights you gain about the investor’s personality via twitter.
Just a thought but I hope it helps and am a big fan of your writing.
I like seeing a mix of personal with business tweets. I like knowing about @goodboyrumba and I enjoyed hearing about your vacation. I like knowing that @chrisbrogan has kids and how he spends his time with them. And it’s the same with the others that I follow who I haven’t met…it makes the conversations a bit more personal.
To me, this isn’t much different than the casual conversations I hold with my clients. That little bit of sharing just makes the relationship a bit nicer.
And I’d feel funny following your personal account on Twitter (if you were to get one, that is).
I like the 80/20 rule quoted earlier, and I think your tweets fall well within those limits.
Char
Jeremiah-
There is a theme taking place here. Twitter is primarily for work and Facebook for personal friends. I agree with that, but can’t we have friends in a work environment? I saw a post by Joe Jaffe about Manchester United and how he dislikes them. I replied and learned that he is a die hard Spurs fan. That is something that I never would have known without the personal side of Twitter.
There needs to be a balance and some personal Tweets here and there help build relationships and allow followers to see more than just the business side of people. I think our views on business have a lot of personality behind them and Twitter opens the blinds. What I don’t want to hear is that someone just got to work, poured some coffee, opened email, had a phone call, went to the bathroom, sat in a boring meeting and now working on a presentation. Personal Tweets must show allow a view into your life.
I believe it’s about setting expectations. If I know your Twitter feed is going to be 80% business and 20% personal, then I’m not going to get frustrated at the odd post about you munching on an overcooked steak.
But it has to be consistent.
I also think the type of personal detail you give is important too. If you’re in London for example on a conference and give the odd post about the horrible weather or Dave from company X was seen chatting to Mike from company Y, it’s personal but also relevant.
This is a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately too. I think most of the posters have nailed the varying perspectives but I wonder if the answer to the question “how much to share” is driven by gender, ethnicity or generation? My kids who are Asian-American are much more comfortable “living in public” than my generation. And, my husband and his friends, who are non-Asian, are much more comfortable than me and my first generation Asian, female friends.
Hi Jeremiah,
Andrew is going to be a tough act to follow! However, I’m in the camp that the technology is deficient. Twitter and/or Facebook. Today they’re bullhorns vs radio stations. They drive multiple account creation vs individual account stratification.
Twitter could allow you or your end user to select “all/personal/business” options. Posting a tweet could default to all but if just personal (“This lobster is great at Davos”) then hit “personal” and only those on that “channel” would see.
Facebook could have knocked LinkedIn out if it allowed for greater subtlety in how you managed your contacts and content. Who wants to manage multiple sites if they can do it all through one location?
Justin
Jeremiah,
This raises a great question when it comes to corporate blogging. Obviously you have separated yourself from Forrester enough to make this decision for yourself. But in the corporate environment where does the line exist and is it better practice to have a true separation? If true company sponsered blogging is chosen, does it then dilute the personal touch to the end reader if the writer has to stay within boundaries?
-Trent
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I think that we all ahould share I mean if we do not share how will other people get a chance at things there is always an answer with sharing