Vanity Googling

In response to this post from Slate I thought I'd Google myself this morning. The majority of results were unsurprisingly related to my own unintentional career personal brand development. However mixed in to that were results from my personal friends' Facebook pages.

As we interact online, we tend to develop persona's to match the media. On Facebook I will talk about my friends, family and display pictures of my home. I have a few blogs that I use to discuss other personal and social interest topics. On Twitter I try to keep content more work-orientated, discussing advertising, social networking and the like. However this morning I used it to talk hip-hop and basketball - my private interests blurring with my professional.

As we move our lives increasingly on-line, how will this effect our personal brands? Will our private lives go on show to our clients?

I'm debating becoming an online schizophrenic and creating a nom de plume to conduct business under.

Facts and Figures

Courtesy of the Mike Craney's Mediacom Marketing Digest, here's some ridiculous numbers. the source of which is Andy Lark, guest at a recent Marketing Association "Brainy Breakfast"

· 40 exabytes (that’s 4.0 x 1019) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.
· There are 106 million users of MySpace.
· If MySpace were a country it would be the 11th biggest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).
· There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.
· 120,000 new blogs are created every day.
· Can’t keep up with your online reading? Read faster – there are 58,000 new blog postings every hour.
· 90% of all commentary on a blog happens in the first 24 hours following the original posting. After that, it’s old news
· And finally – a factoid that fascinated the audience: 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.