I was flipping through my copy of John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's book Born Digital this morning, and I came across a very interesting section. In it the authors describe how "identity in a digital age gives rise to two paradoxes".

First, that people (digital natives specifically, but really anyone) can adjust their social identity (online) with ease, but have little ability to control how that identity is perceived by others. "Social identities are much richer, more varied, and more persistent - and far less under our control - than ever before."

Secondly, that although one can easily create multiple identities online, we are "more bound to a single identity". In other words, we can create different identities depending on whether we are in Facebook, or LinkedIn, or World of Warcraft, or Second Life - each tailored to the specific audience, and we THINK we can keep personal and professional identities compartmentalized - but in reality, these multiple identities are starting to converge more and more, "creating a much fuller picture of the individual than was possible before, spanning a greater period of time." Further, "An onlooker can look across these networked publics and pull together multiple versions of someone's identity together into a single view. Over time, the identity of a Digital Native may come to look extremely different from the identity that the Digital Native intends to convey to the world."

If we extrapolate these two paradoxes and think about how they relate to an organization's online identity as opposed to an individual's, I think they still apply. The first is really saying, "we think we have control over our brand, but we don't"; and the second one is saying, "we target communications and how we present ourselves to different audiences, but our whole brand identity is easily revealed." I realize I'm probably skipping a few logical steps in there, but you get the gist, right? The first is "the myth of control", the second is "authenticity is the new cool".

In other words, as an organization, we also have a social identity. We are building a presence on the social web, opening up our communications, learning how to engender trust, how to enable employees to represent us, how to have a personality, how to be transparent, etc. We're thinking about how to layer all kinds of rich conversation on top of our traditional marketing. We're adding complexity while peeling away layers, if that makes sense; we're learning to relinquish control and give our members more ownership, in several different yet connected spaces. More varied, more complex, less control.

At the same time, as we build our online presence, we try to be sensitive to the "cultures" of the outposts we choose to operate in. We listen to the social web, we find our members, we start conversing with them more socially in Facebook, more professionally in LinkedIn, more succinctly (and faster) in Twitter... if we're able to, we choose specific people to be community builders in each outpost according to who already has a comfort level for each space; we try and match our organizational presence to each culture in order to be welcomed and included in that outpost. We create our own personality around our homebase website too, of course. 

Originally posted @ SocialFishing...