I am not a social media professional. Let me make that clear. I am able to run this blog in relative distance from my day to day job and I would not think that any of the opinions I express here would be attributed to anyone other than me. I recently got a chance to catch up with the head of social media for a large company and one of my questions to him was whether or not he felt he was able to maintain any sort of personal voice online since his voice was inevitably linked to his company. Another person at the presentation asked a great follow up of what he would do if he no longer worked for that company and wanted to start promoting something or somebody else. How would he make that transition?

His answers were quite revealing in that he said he did not really think he had a personal voice online anymore. Whereas he could go online and comment at any site (the employer did not ban him), he knew that readers of his corporate blog had come to associate his voice as the voice of his employer and as such did not really feel he should comment outside of his corporate role.

This answer was extremely interesting to me because I quite enjoy the fact that I am able to write on this blog pretty much as I please. I am not sure I would want my voice to be the voice of the company until I felt I held a position within the company with which I could influence the direction of the company. Although I am certainly not diminishing the role of the corporate social media professional, for me if I reach a position whereby I am fundamentaly influencing the direction of the company then I am happy with my online persona being associated with the company.

So to all the social media professionals out there, how do you do it? Do you try to keep your corporate persona and online personal persona differentiated? What if you change jobs? Your comments and thoughts are appreciated.