Why Don’t Social Networks Enable Different Personas?

Our Social Times hosted a workshop last week for about fifteen Communication and Marketing Managers from local authorities. We covered the fundamentals of Inbound Marketing, including blogging, SEO, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. As always, I put a strong focus on lead generation and getting tangible results – i.e. customers, sign-ups or positive “interventions” – and they left the room with some really clear, obvious next steps for improving their use of social media. Job done!

Or was it?  Time and time again throughout the day I heard these creative and enthused individuals sighing in desperation about how their newly gained knowledge would be impossible to implement “back at the office”. Some local authorities have bans on the use of social networks; others have such tight usage policies that, to all intents and purposes, the activity is effectively sterilised; while others a still stuck in the mindset that, since a large percentage of local residents are (it is perceived) not using Facebook – they are duty bound to focus on more “inclusive” means of communication. I came up against this argument repeatedly in 2001/2 when I was building online communities for charities. Given that 80% of the UK population have a social networking account – and 8% are using Twitter – it’s simply ridiculous that this dark-ages view is still in circulation.

The most interesting point for me, however, was that there were some genuine issues that local authorities face. One attendee had recently written the social media usage guidelines for her organisation – and so I asked whether they were as open and sensible as the Civil Service blogging guidelines. They were much tighter, she said, and then she gave a very clear and sensible reason why. The guidelines, she said, had a vast array of people to cover, from Councillors to administrators to dustmen to firemen. Taking the last of these by way of example, she explained how firemen on sometimes post updates about their work on Facebook. Evidently, if their post relates to an accident or fatal incident, this can offend or hurt relatives or friends of the victim. The council therefore requires employees not to publish any news or information relating to their work.

For me this raises the fundamental problem about using primarily social networks for business. These services were built to share personal news and information, not promote corporate interests or respect business boundaries. So far none of the leading social networks has a feature for different “personas”, to allow users to switch between business and personal usage, and I can’t help wondering if this isn’t massively overdue.

Back in 2005 my colleagues and I built the ability to publish separate news to business contacts, family and friends on etribes.com. Our users were telling us then that this was a problem (and we only had 50,000 of them!). I can’t imagine the chorus that Facebook must be withstanding not to have implemented some such feature! Either the incumbents need to deal with this issue, or new players will enter the market offering the versatility of personas. Perhaps they are already on the market and I’ve missed them? If so – please enlighten me :)