Your blog, your name, your brand, your risk.
June 28, 2007
My name is Tiffany. The reason I’m not saying my last name? Well, I’m not sure I should. Recent things like the Creating Passionate Users catastrophe quite honestly have me a bit nervous. I believe in transparency, and I am an advocate of personal career branding, but I am struggling with the good-versus-bad of a name as unique as mine. A recent entry on pen names, real names and real life by Penelope Tunk – once Adrienne GreenHart – only confused my feelings on the matter more.
See, it’s personal and it’s business, and it’s difficult not to blur those lines anymore. It’s difficult to know if blurred lines is good or bad both for my career and my real, actual life.
Enter the personal: My serious boyfriend has a rather common last name. I’ve had many a heartfelt, heart wrenching conversations with him about the inevitable decision to some day change my name and become one of hundreds of Tiffany Plainnames. I don’t want to hyphenate an already three-syllable last name with a two syllable one tagged onto the end of a three syllable first name. It would take a good 30 seconds just to spit that out!
Enter the career: I’m pursuing my master’s degree, and hoping to make a name for myself in academia. I also want to blog about the theories I’m delving into, and hey, wouldn’t it be nice if my online persona could be tied to my academic one? And wouldn’t I want any potential employers or clients to be able to easily tie me – the real, live, actual me – to all those things? Heck, yes. Isn’t that the point everyone from Penelope Trunk to Fast Company trying to make about how blogging is essential to a career these days?
But do I want to invite attacks by bizarre, unsolicited stalkers, simply for being in the blog world as who I am? No. For sure, 100%, no.
The questions surrounding the name and the personal brand abound, and the more I think about it, the less clear the answers become.
- Do I assign my full name to this blog, cross my fingers, and hope for the best, as well as an angel of safety on me and my property?
- Do I dare connect my personal life to my career in a 2.0 world?
- When my thesis is published, what name do I put on it?
- Do I change my last name, hyphenate it, or go by my maiden name for career and academia, and my personal name for – finances and monograms?
- Am I alone in this?
The answer to the last question is obvious. I’m not alone. My co-worker and I author a blog for our company, and we’ve gotten into many a heated discussion about transparency, authenticity, and being a female blogger in a not-so-friendly mediated world. I don’t know if men really think about this topic a lot – it tends to lie on women the identity burden of the potential name change phenomenon, as well, unfortunately, as the burden of potential threats of physical harm by weirdos.
So here we are, young, career-minded women, dreaming of a personal brand like that of Seth Godin, Penelope Trunk, or Adrianna Huffington. The thing is, do we make it really personal, like Seth , or do we take a page from Penelope’s book, grab a pen name, and figure it out from there?
I’m leaning towards taking the journalist byline approach and putting my name out there for the sake of my career, but I have to say, it’s enough to make a girl think. A lot. What do you think?
____________________
Update: As Penelope Trunk herself pointed out in the comments below, Penelope Trunk is now her real name – not a pen name. I merely used her personal naming struggle as example very clearly illustrating the issue I feel I face. Thanks, Penelope, for commenting and for your example of transparency, as well as your encouragement!
Recently, Seth Godin invited the world to blog. He asks everyone to join the conversation – at least once – and points out that while there are tons of blogs out there on a zillion topics (to me, it seems most focus, ironically, on blogging itself), most people in the world don’t blog, and perhaps they should, even if ever-so-smally. I agree with him. We should all blog. I’ve been blogging for about four years, much more time than tons of prominent bloggers out there. But chances are, you’ve never heard of me. Here’s why:
My passion for blogging has taken me to the extent that my own ambitions are too divided, and I have a few too many blogs. I agree with Seth too much. I’d love to be on this list of the world’s top 150 marketing blogs - or at the top of it like Mr. Godin. But I’m not. Here’s what my adventures in blogging have gotten me so far:
-
My first, personal blog to make new internet pals and learn the blogging ropes.
-
MySpage page blog to keep up with old friends.
-
Littleredsuit (at WordPress) to further conversations on my thesis topic and build contacts in the professional world.
-
Pop culture blog (at WordPress) to talk about pop culture and other interests.
-
USA Today profile blog – for the heck of it.
-
Virb blog – because I think Virb is a great site and more people should use it.
-
A total of two or three regular readers in all.
The problem with this is that the desire to diversity my blogging points of contact is not, in fact, helping my efforts. It’s hurting them. Instead of being able to invest a good 30 minutes an evening in writing an excellent blog post, I’m stuck having to troll around all these various sites, write a post every other week to each of them, and try to maintain relationships with various readers on various platforms.
Another thing is, I have a different personality, screen name or user name at each of these sites. I, unlike Seth, don’t have the sort of web credibility where I can presume to call myself “Tiffany” and generate much out of that than a few spam comments at my not-so-prominent-yet blog. I know I’m not alone in this plight.
The typical answer to this type of newb-typical complaint would be to simply use my full name on all my blogs and to link them to one another and promote the heck out of them. This would be the right answer. And, and would honestly love to do just that. But as a female blogger, stories of other prominent women in the blogging world being personally attacked and stalked in the regular-osphere make me balk a bit at the idea. Add that to the fact that when you Google my full name, you get 100% me, and you can see why I might have a bit of pause at making a full emergence into the blogging world. Companies would kill for the name SEO I have for my own personal brand, so it’s a good thing and a bad thing if you ask me (until I get married and there’s the whole hypenate or not issue, which is another post for another time). I think total transparency is great, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t really want a creepy stalker forcing me off the web and out of my home because they can find where I live. I’m not in it for that kind of – “fame.”
So . . . what’s a girl to do? Is it simply an irrational fear that’s holding me back, or is it actually a good thing to be a little-known-blogger in it for mainly the experience itself? Where should I go from here? Where do any of us go with this? I wonder what Seth would say to those questions.
Change your life – have dinner with the kids.
June 12, 2007
This guy seems to have it right. Not only did Cameron Stracher change his family life by deciding to trade some time at work for the chance to have dinner with his family every night for one school year, he may well have changed his career prospects as well. Blogging and writing a book about his journey to family time, this guy has the right idea of how to use social media to really potentially improve his life. And he even made USA Today.
Where will he take this? Who knows. But do we all have the potential to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary? We might, if we just go for it.
