How Do You Separate Your Interests & Identities?

Today I have a question to ask: how do you separate your interests & identities?

Traditionally I’ve separated my life into three identities:

• Personal: Things having nothing to do with work
• Professional: Things having to do with my career, but not necessarily my business
• Corporate: Things directly related to my business

Online these roughly align to:

• Personal: Facebook & an old personal web site
• Professional: LinkedIn, @FastFedora & this web site
• Corporate: @LabEscape & the Lab Escape web site

While a bit complicated, this has been easy to manage.

Lately though I’ve been broadening my professional interests and sharing personal interests that have relevance to my professional life.

Yet not everyone may be interested in everything I have to share. Those who want to read about analytics would be disappointed with my recent blog posts on personal growth, while my decision-making and technology posts go too deep for some people.

I want to re-organize my channels of expression to align better with those who want to engage with me online. But how to do this?

For the web site, I’ve thought of:

• Separate sites with different brands
• Sub-sites with different brands (e.g.: analytics.fastfedora.com)
• One site with different categories

For the last one, I’m not sure whether to implement this as a single WordPress blog with categories or multiple WordPress blogs so I have the flexibility of creating sub-categories and tracking each channel better.

For Twitter, I’ve thought of:

• One Twitter account to rule them all (e.g.: @FastFedora)
• Separate Twitter accounts with common branding (e.g.: @FFAnalytics, @FFDecisions)
• Separate Twitter accounts with separate branding

It’s a shame Twitter doesn’t allow you to send out tweets on channels within an account similar to Facebook Groups or Google+ Circles. That would at least solve the Twitter half.

In the end, I want to ensure:

1. Someone following me on Twitter or subscribing to my blog gets content consistent with their interests.
2. I can continue writing and doing projects across a range of interests.
3. Things don’t get to complicated.

So I’m curious: how do you handle sharing multiple interests with others online?