In 2009, "social media" became the conventional buzzword to replace "Web 2.0" as the most eye-roll-inducing term of the year. To be fair, social media captured a lot of what was finally maturing: photo sharing sites like Flickr, video sharing like YouTube, professional networks like LinkedIn, and of course getting friend requests from Grandma as Facebook went from avant garde to ubiquity. And, of course, we cannot escape Twitter gaining popularity for its service instead of its famous fail whale.

As scare stories of "what you put on the web will haunt you forever and completely mess up your next job interview, you crazy kids" crested and waned in popularity, I began to notice another trend in how web professionals were using these social media tools, especially a core few. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and an evolving cast of supporting players have formed a subgroup of social media I think of as "social identity" applications.

So what is a social identity, and why should it matter?

As the (sadly often true) scare stories of drunken frat photos coming back to harm newly-minted college grads in their first job interviews suggest, what you do online forms an identity you have, every bit as much as your name, resume, and social interactions at work might have previously. For a workforce such as programmers and technical professionals who increasingly take advantage of their ability to work with just a broadband internet connection with a capable laptop and cellphone to work in virtual teams, that identity is almost completely formed electronically.

2009 was the year that these professionals went beyond being careful about their online presence to actively using social media applications to form the basis of their professional reputation and identity. Blogs have long been important for creating online identities, as previously-unknown people became pundits in their own rights simply by blogging. But even for the vaunted Instapundit, blogging has been a past-tense experience. Social media tools that provide status updates linked to information about a person create a much more immediate presence and a sense of what the person is doing right this moment, and observing it over time gives you a sense of what that professional does and how they do it.

With two-income households a reality and increased costs of transportation as regulations to reduce man-made causes of climate change are introduced, the tendency to perform knowledge work from any suitable location rather than in a single physical space is going to grow. Corporations are already struggling with the new class of independent contractor programmer who stays in one affordable location and joins and collaborates with virtual teams that arise and disband as projects evolve. Policy organizations, especially organizations who find it increasingly difficult to meet the salary demands of high-cost locations where suitable candidates tend to gather, may soon face this trend as well.

Professionals who are a part of this trend will want to master online reputation-building. Many web professionals have already chosen to split their identity by application: Twitter and LinkedIn, together with a blog and basic contact info, form the basis of their professional identity. Snippets learned from conferences, requests for information or help from the community, and occasional water-cooler gripes form most of their output. They either ignore or lock down Facebook to ensure that friends and family have a place to interact with them that is separated from their work identity. Both identities are social; but one is public, professional, and, to varying degrees, collegial while the other handles the personal and private. Others blur the lines and accept that their personal and professional lines will cross, and mainly distinguish their interactions by tone. Political commentary will mix with professional commentary, and the context of their interaction will determine what approach they take.

Policy organizations often face a greater challenge to separate personal from public opinion. A nonprofit organization, for example, can run into problems if they are chartered as non-partisan but a staffer mixes personal protected speech with utterances more suited to work. Successful policy professionals will likely adopt the strict separation approach. Separating the two does not mean tweets will have to be formally written by the communications department and vetted by legal, it just means that informal comments will have to be apolitical in nature. Professional relationships require a certain amount of collegiality, and an online identity, to be complete, must have all aspects of a conventional working relationship.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought in how to adapt your organization for the advent of increased telework and how to adapt your online persona to embrace social media to define your social identity rather than merely restrict it. Following successful online professionals has given me a much richer professional network than I could achieve locally or by attending conferences. It takes those fortuitous "hallway track" conference encounters and turns them into a sustainable professional relationship.