Twitter’s New Feature, Contributors, Will Force us to Separate Professional and Personal Twitter Identities

Posted by Anthea Watson on Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Twitter started testing a new feature on Monday called contributors. The feature allows accounts that represent an organization to manage how its employees post to the organization’s twitter feed. It’s designed to make it easier for groups to manage multiple users on one account.

Say, for example, I wanted to post something to the New Organizing Institute twitter account, @neworganizing. Currently, Anne Marie Ashburn (@ratherbeskiing) manages the NOI twitter account for us, and will post or RT something if I ask her to. Under the new system, NOI employees could access the NOI account under their own names, and a small byline would appear under the tweet letting NOI’s followers know who tweeted the message. Like this.

Mashable has some exclusive shots of how the new feature will look.

Organizations looking to forge an authentic online voice will love this new feature. By identifying which staffer or volunteer is participating in the conversation, we’ll be more transparent about our online communication and hopefully generate more interesting content.

This will also force us as individuals to become much more careful about our online brands. @neworganizing has many, many more followers than I do personally on my twitter handle @antheawatson. I’m bound to attract attention as an official contributor with a byline on the NOI tweets. By being an official contributor, I’ll benefit from extra followers personally as people become interested in my tweets. Also, you can imagine the benefit to my next employer if I bring some of the NOI audience with me to my next gig. (Love you NOI, not leaving anytime soon.) However, there's a down side to all this. By tweeting as a contributor, I will also tie the NOI brand to my personal brand more publicly. If I make an off-color joke, or take a controversial position in my personal feed, NOI might feel some backlash.

To some extent, we were already starting to see the individual twitter brand merge with the professional brand with Twitter lists and @cotags. NOI has included me as part of its employee list, and a lot of my followers know I work for NOI from the content of my tweets. However, I think this new feature will amplify this affect.

Ultimately, this new feature means the end of the online combination of our personal and professional identities in one twitter feed. Once I become a contributor to other brands, it won’t be appropriate for me to be talking about positions I take that don’t mirror the positions taken by the organizations for which I currently work, AND the organizations for whom I am likely to work in the future.

So take note followers of @antheawatson, I’m about to get a lot more work - appropriate and a lot less funny.