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This week we dive into a topic that might be considered a little bit contradictory to something we have always espoused in the world of social media, establishing multiple profiles. Demonstrating transparency and open communications has been a mantra towards establishing long term credibility in the new world order of marketing. In today’s episode we talk about how having a different Twitter profile can keep the conversation nicely segmented.
First we chat about our fine telephone and internet service provider here in Atlanta called Digital Agent. Howard Hunter and the crew have been taking care of us for almost 10 years now, and we find days when the service goes down as infinitely bizarre.
And, by the way don’t forget to set up a Firefox browser plugin called FoxMarks to make sure that you can hop from machine to machine and still maintain your same bookmarks and passwords for ease of use.
We have our business profiles on Twitter that are focused on social media marketing, advertising and other topics that cross over into the personal 
such as music, baseball, families and anything else that happens to cross our minds. We are fairly open regarding what is going on. Recently, we have discovered some value into taking our Baseball related profiles and having very specific conversations and relationships around just that topic. Nothing else flows into the stream, making it easy to engage in the subject at hand… Baseball.
For businesses, we have seen a trend where corporate communications guidelines are directing or supressing what can be tweeted, so some are choosing to set up their own personal profiles to segment the topics of conversations. It could be detrimental to the direction we want to take social media clients in, which is to be open and not to try to spin the conversation. Let the customers help you to direct the communications.
We don’t want this strategy to be misconstrued .. we are simply trying to silo the conversations so that Baseball is what we know we will find there.
The tools that we have including Tweetie, Twitterific, Tweetdeck, Seesmic .. all of the applications make it much easier to manage multiple accounts now.
Is there is difference when considering managing multiple Facebook accounts?
In fact, in our case we do have an account that is used to manage and set up client Fan Pages so that the activity is not mixed into the normal stream that friends would see.
More and more decisions will have to be made from a political standpoint regarding letting a client or co-worker get access to a full Facebook profile.
The opening and closing theme for the Overflow Podcast is called The Information Age, by Anthony Fiumano and you can find it at the Podsafe Music Network.
You can subscribe to The Overflow Podcast directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.
