Being Yourself Online

Photo by jelene

When people tell you to “be yourself”, what does that mean?

Everyone has multiple aspects of their personality that they show depending on the situation. For example, you might be a very different person at work, with close friends, or with your family.

It is definitely important to be yourself online. People want to connect to a real person, not some fake figurehead. So go ahead and show your personality. But give some thought to which aspects of your personality you want to emphasize.

I got to thinking about this lately as I became active on Twitter. This is definitely a place where you need to let your personality shine through.

One thing I started to notice was people’s profiles. You can have a custom background, and people are putting this to interesting use.

Lately many people are starting to follow a trend of putting a rectangle similar to a business card in their background – see Darren Rowse’s profile for an example.

Contrast Darren’s profile to my profile background, which is an image that I chose just because I love the colors. I thought about putting one of those “business cards” in my background, but then I thought, no, the background I have expresses my personality just fine right now.

At the other extreme, some people have a twitter background that is so busy that you just want to click away before your eyes start hurting too bad! I would not recommend that approach.

It’s funny that as I was thinking about this whole “showing your personality” thing this week, I came across Lee McIntyre’s post, What Does Your Homepage Say About You? He recently changed the theme on his blog. It used to be more brightly-colored and unique to Lee. Now he has a theme that is similar to what I have seen other top internet marketers using.

Lee states that he wants to project a more businesslike image to prospective business contacts. Here is a quote from his post:

Who am I talking about? Well the list of different types of people looking at this blog as a way of ‘measuring’ my business is endless.

Customers, JV partners, potential employees, accountants, government agencies, prospects, suppliers, banks, merchant account provider, and so on.

All these people look at my homepage and what they see and feel feeds into their decision about whether or not they want to continue talking business.

At first, I disagreed with Lee, thinking that it is more important to stand out and be unique than to project a businesslike image.

But now I’m not so sure. The more I think about it, the more validity I see in Lee’s decision. His business revolves around selling information about internet business. If people want to buy information on this topic, they want to buy from someone who is successful. And certainly a more “corporate” image connotes success.

I think it is important to combine the two things – a successful image and your own personality. They are both important in our business.

I might even change my own blog’s theme to project more of an image of success in the future. And who knows, I may even change my lovely twitter background.

In any case, I’m going to continue to show my personality in an appropriate way. Personality is a critical aspect of marketing online.

What do you think? What image or personality do you project online?

- Pat Doyle