You’re right thou – and this clearly shows that there are different “audiences” (god, horrible in my dmje context) for different bits of content..

I followed the professional you on Twitter for a while but eventually unsubscribed – bored with all the tech tiny url’s, code nonsense and such.

Now I just follow the personal you – he makes me laugh with inconsequential inanities, made-up swear words and mapping frequent fatherly naps.

I think it is nice to have a split Twitter personality. Twitter is undeniably a marketing tool nowadays, go with that I say and target your 140 characters properly.

I suppose I’m in the camp that says one persona doesn’t necessarily fit all.

After all, in pre-Web times (yes, yes, THAT long ago), the persona I presented to my friends down the pub, the things I said and the way I said them, was quite different to the one I presented to my employer.

And even down the pub, I might have presented different personas depending on who I was in the pub with.

Similarly with the work context, I’ve had jobs where I’ve felt comfortable revealing a good deal of my personal life to colleagues and managers, and I’ve had jobs where I’ve felt much more cautious.

That doesn’t have to be because I’m “worried” about some “repercussions” based on what I say; it may just be that I don’t think it’s any of their business.

I also don’t think it’s as simple as a binary personal/professional or private/public thing (even a blurred binary thing!), and we actually present several different personas.

And currently at least, many social networking tools are ill-equipped to provide that sort of flexibility.

I think you’re right about some of the practicalities. I should also be clear – I’m very (very!) careful with *any* online content to not mention people or employers by name, and rude though I might be, I try (most of the time) not to go *too* far

I think the trust thing applies as it does to – say – an email. The implicit trust level in a private account I think applies in the same way. I don’t think many people would publicise a private email by publishing it. I could be wrong.

Have I turned people away from @dmje? – yes. I get fairly frequent requests to follow which I treat just like anyone with a private account would treat requests to follow in Twitter, Facebook, wherever.

I actually find Tweetdeck pretty good – not ideal – but better than anything else I’ve used . Ditto Echofon for mobile use.

That in itself wouldn’t free you from worries about whether more colourful blowing-off-steam could be seen as unprofessional. When I bump into protected feeds I can’t help but wonder what are they hiding? Are they self-important? being ‘secretly’ unprofessional? or simply creeped out at the idea of putting their life on show. It’s really frustrating trying to follow threads that suddenly stop at a protected user. All or nothing seems too course grained, are you simply using two users as a kludge or do they perform some useful partitioning of intended audience and tone.

Even then how do you handle the overlap? have you ever had to turn anybody from your professional life down from @dmje? – “you couldn’t handle the real me”. It’s not like things don’t leak from protected feeds, its easy enough for somebody to make a cut&paste retweet or heaven forbid put a screenshot of it into a public presentation. You’d need a level of trust and followers of both aspects would also need to understand what topics and tone where applicable to which person. It does sound complicated.

So far I’ve stuck with the one public profile, but consciously avoided passing on any specific details or names about who I work for (at least while I had a job). In my head at least this gave me some level of deniability if say I moaned about something stupid that’d happened at work. But I might well feel differently if anybody from the office started following me.

Do wonder how you use tweetdeck to keep up with so many followers in each account, I can only get 3-4 columns on the screen, most of mine are groups on general/likely topic themes. I’ve also started using brizzy whose groups also allow me to add people I’m not following in twitter. A kind of dark-follows, which stops any fringe or noisy interests from polluting the main feed, but feels a little creepy (esp. if I’m tempted to reply).

I think in general I have the “LIOLI” attitude, too, but I think it is muddied when the personal voice gets muddied up with company voice. I was thinking last night about how different I’d feel if I worked for myself or owned my own agency: I think I’d then be entirely happy to just be me on all of my communication channels. Partly this is about the fact that not all companies are as progressive as they should be, and still see “Their Voice” as being sacrosanct, and “The Employee” as not a voice but a component part.

FWIW I don’t find your tweets dull at all, but I’m always a fan of even more scrumpy-related whitterings