Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

In an attempt to classify/categorize myself based on the proliferation of the little bits of drivel that live out in googleland, I've been attempting to separate out the professional and unprofessional. Its an information architecture exercise that really only requires two sticky notes on a whiteboard. A selfonomy, if you will.

For the most part, its a simple exercise to throw your user-generated content into one of two buckets; ok for my employer (or another employer, or my aunt who has just discovered google) to read, and things you do in your spare time when you're pretending to be younger/cooler/more interesting than you really are. In other words, loosely, professional and unprofessional. You can choose your own buckets, but this is my starting point.

There are some places that live in both buckets, and, interestingly, hop from one to another over time. In order to let people determine my credentials, I'm simply referring them to profiles I've already created out there in social networks, so, for 'professional', I'm linking to LinkedIn, and for 'unprofessional', I'm linking to Facebook. However, I'm not entirely convinced its such an easy mapping, and I'm pondering whether to switch things around. As Curtis mentions, increasingly, the Facebook generation (I'm sure that's a registered collective noun or something) are moving towards LinkedIn as the place to be seen, the place to raise a profile. Conversely, withered old professionals like me, especially in the internet industries, are moving toward Facebook as the place to create social and professional networks with their peers. I don't know why that is. Perhaps when you hit thirty-five you are compelled to turn people into zombies or show how much like someone else you are, based on the ranking of ten videos you don't even like.

In the end, empoyers and employees will probably all miss each other, and it'll be like some horrible web 2.0 party where all the employers are being childish in the kitchen, while the prospective employees are sitting quietly in the living room, waiting for someone to ask them to dance. I suspect it may not actually be like that, because most people who have a profile in one have a profile in the other, but the real question is, which one would you want an employer to read? The one with the resume, or the one which might actually say something about you?

Actually, it doesn't matter, because you've probably got your name all over at least three other sites where you are twittering nonsense all day, so it doesn't take long to peel back any veneer of respectability you might have crafted for yourself, to see what you're really like. Which is precisely why I'm going through this exercise, although I know I'll end up throwing a misjudged satirical parody in the 'professional' bucket by mistake and I'll be hoist by my own petard, as usual. You're not reading this are you, auntie?

Tunes: The Twang: Either Way

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