Everybody has an Internet persona. In fact, these days, it’s more than common for most people to have multiple Internet personas, only one of which might be called “real”. People create identities that are specific to platforms or their interests, and we barely even blink about that anymore.
I am of course influenced by my own involvement in fandom, where anonymity online has been the status quo for the majority of fandoms since they first went online. There are multiple reasons for this, from an unwillingness to be viewed as immature and childish because of your fandom interests, to fear of losing your job for writing erotic fanfiction. Both are valid fears and both are reasons why people have chosen to create multiple identities online, so that they can have both their public persona, often associated with their legal or real-life name, and a person (or two) for their (for lack of a better term) hobbies. That’s just a couple of reasons why someone might have multiple online personas, but there are many more.
For instance, a very common situation that a lot of people don’t think about these days is a job persona versus a personal, intimate persona. Is very clear to me that the younger generation, the millennials and generation Z (yes I understand generational tags are limited when using them to describe mass behaviors of groups, but here we are) understand this in a way that my generation, generation X, kind of knows but doesn’t articulate well and often doesn’t practice well, and certainly not something even older generations are comfortable with too much. Exceptions abound, and I understand that. What I’m talking about here is generalities.
We have people in their teens and 20s and 30s who own multiple instances of social media. They will have a public Facebook profile account and then a private Facebook or Instagram account, completely separate. This is much the same way fans in the fanfiction community have private tumblr or Dreamwidth accounts and public ones associated with their public, “real” name.
And there lies the rub: “real name”.
What is a name? Which persona is more real? There are academics who are studying this and I don’t think I have anything important to say about it from either the sociological or philosophical side. My interest in this topic is a bit more personal than that. Getting back to the idea that someone might have good reason to maintain very separate online personas, the fact is that sometimes when your online personas do need to overlap, it can be very difficult to do. Which is the problem that I am facing right now.
I have been online and in possession of my own website since 1996. The domain name has changed occasionally but has settled for almost two decades now on kimboosan.net. That is me as a person in real life.
(An aside: If I were doing things over, I would just stick to my name KimBoo York, as “kimboosan” is awkward for several reasons – the Japanese honorific “san” is nothing I have earned or have any valid reason to use, personally or professionally – and it’s a nickname that was given to me when I was a baby by my father’s Air Force friends, who wanted to harass him with the fact that they could come up with a nickname for his daughter. The reason for that is my father hated nicknames, an irony after 50 years in the Air Force off and on, where he had multiple nicknames over the years. I guess that’s exactly why he hated them! But here I am, with that domain name and that website, and the social networks I have used that nickname with, which is most of them. I am kimboosan on Facebook but not on twitter, I guess because I came to twitter later than some of my other social networks. I’m kimboosan on Instagram, although I am planning to change that. I was Kimboosan on LiveJournal for many years before I deleted that journal, and I am now Kimboosan on Dreamwidth. That is my public persona, what some would call my “real name” online persona. And it is real, I do not want to suggest that I’ve been lying over these many years. Kimboosan is KimBoo York and that’s who I am. I try to back off from using “kimboosan” these days and changing account names, but it’s a chore for sure.)
But kimboosan/KimBoo is who I am personally, by which I mean who I am to my family, my friends and (occasionally) my colleagues. That is the name people know when they meet me somewhere or see me on Facebook etc. etc. etc. I have spent years and years building that social capital. Mind you, were talking connections in the mere hundreds, not the thousands, much less the tens of thousands. It’s a modest network, but it’s mine. It is what I refer to as my “public persona” because it is linked to me by my actual, legal(ish) name.
Setting aside discussion of my fandom identity, which a few of my public persona friends know about but in general is fairly anonymous, I want to talk about my other identities. Those are K.C. York, which is obviously me, who is an author. It’s not a marketing-driven pseudonym designed to appeal to niche target readers, but rather is a catchall for publishing the stories I love to write and want to publish under my own name.
The other persona is a newer one as in it was just born in 2018, and so has very little social networking or social media capital at all. That’s my business name: the Author Alchemist. It’s a creativity coaching business that was soft launched back in July and is still on the launching pad as far as gearing up for marketing and products that I can sell. (I will probably write another blog post about how shy I am launching this business, and my imposter syndrome about it, and my fears that I will be seen as selling out by getting into online coaching, but this is not that post!).
The problem here is that the Internet has pretty much been designed from the start for individual personas, that is, a single individual with a single online profile. Most of us, especially those of us used to having multiple personas, are very good at keeping them all separate. This is why I had four different tumblrs, three different twitter accounts, two different Facebook accounts, and many, many different email addresses.
I know I’m not alone in this, especially in the community of professional authors who write in multiple genres with multiple pen names. But anyone who started a business many years ago and created their Facebook profile based on that and then either left the business, sold it, or closed it, and now is stuck with social capital that they spent many hours of their life building and have no way to transfer it over to the new persona and are stuck with an identity that is completely irrelevant to their life these days, knows exactly what I’m talking about. This is one reason why a lot of modern social marketing mavens tell you to always create your online profiles using your real name. That way anything you become involved with, whether it’s a hobby or a business or what have you, will be an add-on in your bio for that social media space and not an intrinsic part of the name the people of following.
And that is great advice…unless you want to have a private life, too. Or you have more than two public personas you want to connect.
So here is where I am at why this is an issue for me: I am KimBoo (kimboosan), I am K.C. York, I am the Author Alchemist. These are things that I want to be related in the algorithms as part of who I am. If people stumble across one profile, I want them to know that they can find the other personas as well if they’re interested in doing so.
My Facebook, for instance, is hundreds of people whom I care about to some degree or another, either because I’ve known them in for many years as friends or because I think they are interesting people who I’ve met through connections online and have developed valuable relationships with them in that space. I do not consider my Facebook a business networking site. (Yes, I know about LinkedIn but that’s really not a platform I’m very invested in, and it strikes me it is far more useful for people in corporate-type jobs and people looking for jobs than it is for business entrepreneurs or authors). Yet, it has been an online hub for me since 2006, which it first opened up for public users, and that represents a lot of history in the time scale of the world wide web. While I don’t want to hustle my friends and family, they do want to support me, and can be a great resource for expanding brand recognition for my businesses. I have pages for the things I do – K.C. York, Skeptics Inspirational, the Author Alchemist – but it can be a chore updating everything independently.
On the other hand, linking websites is easy. It is easy because you can put a link in there somewhere in the menu asking, “are you looking for someone else? Click here!” And I’ve done that. But then there is Instagram. Which is not quite the social network I use as a private personal outreach to friends, the way I do Facebook or Dreamwidth. Instagram is something I can easily leverage for K.C. York or Author Alchemist.
Notice the “or”.
Trying to reach across lines and connect those public personas to show that in the author K.C. York and the Author Alchemist are one and the same person is tricky, much less that they are both KimBoo. And I mean that technically, not as a philosophical problem. Twitter and Instagram, and I’ll stick with these two as examples as they are the primary platforms for business owners and entrepreneurs these days outside of Facebook, only allow one link in their bio for the user. So which website do I link to? Obviously not my very personal website, despite the fact that it’s also pretty public. It is a site where I talk about life and make blog posts with musings like this. Not things or subjects that, for instance, readers of my fantasy epic series are going to be interested in reading. And it’s certainly not a good marketing tool for either one of my businesses. And not my Dreamwidth account, where I can link to multiple different websites on the sidebar (which strikes me as very 2010 but whatever, were back to Dreamwidth now that tumblr has shit its pants) because that is a very personal area that is locked it down pretty hard…at least as much as any space on the Internet can be locked down when screenshots are so easy to take. But linking to one business website de facto means omitting the other.
I’m working on how to link these things up in a way that is organic and, more importantly, not time-consuming for me to do. Of course, the easiest thing would be to just have multiple accounts for each separate thing. There would be K.C. York accounts, and Author Alchemist accounts, and personal accounts. Generally speaking, that makes the most sense. I can always retweet myself or do shout outs to myself across accounts. I see people doing that all the time.
But! I only have so many hours in the day, FFS. I want both K.C. York and Author Alchemist to be successful while also managing my personal network which is a critical part of my mental health. First off, I still have a day job, Monday through Friday, and between the job itself and commuting that is ten hours of my day. But even if I didn’t have that particular job, I still have other things I want to be doing. Managing three robust online personas would be a taking full-time job all on its own. And note, I am still leaving out my fandom persona, under which I participate every day on platforms like Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, write fanfiction, and read fanfiction. I mean really, I just need to hire somebody for all this shit.
That is actually the damn plan, to be honest. I intend to hire a social media manager to do that. However, that requires paying someone to do it. It’s a job, a real job, and I’m not going to try to take advantage of people by not paying them for that, nor am I going to pretend that it isn’t a job that deserves to be paid.
Which brings us back around to my current income, my student loan debt, and my salary as a state employee for public university. Meaning, I cannot afford to hire anyone right now. I really wanted to hire a personal assistant, if only to help with my agenda, but I can’t even afford that.
That means I am stuck doing it all myself, which means I have to find ways to minimize time investment. Otherwise I’ll spend all day managing multiple media accounts and not doing any of my actual jobs. And quite frankly I enjoy my jobs, even my day!job which can sometimes be frustrating, but I do like. Also writing my stories which I dearly love, and working with other authors to write their stories which is something that is fulfilling in ways I cannot even fully articulate.
It’s a sticky wicket, and every solution I’ve come up with or has been presented to me is not very elegant. I am someone who wants elegant solutions. Ironically one reason that I got into technology in the first place way back in the 90s was because of the promise pf elegant solutions. And while I am the first one in line to say that there are lots of problems these days regarding technology and the Internet, such as privacy issues and moderation issues, and other even more technical issues on having to do with things like operating systems that I won’t bore you with, it has also created a lot of elegance. As usual I believe in the potential as much as I acknowledge the reality.
So, what to do with multiple public personas that you want to link together?
It is an issue of discoverability, which is what it is always boils down to. Creating the connections between K.C. York and Author Alchemist, as well as the transparency of connecting both to the person who is KimBoo, without losing what social capital I have gained and without spending hours a day tracking 6+ social networking accounts, is defeating me.
If there’s an easier way to do this, please let me know.