THE DREAM IN ACTION

The degree of which somebody exposes their personal life on the web is becoming more and more a differentiating factor. Some who are striving for a strong personal brand (i.e. Gary Vaynerchuck) put almost everything out there where others only speak and contribute professionally to the internet. Neither approach is wrong or right but it is a decision you need to make based on how comfortable you are with this personal exposure.

Personally, I’ve chosen to be fairly exposed relative to most. I share personal pictures and often times personal videos but at the same time I choose to avoid Tweets like “Eating soup” or “feeding Fido”. I understand that in order to build a strong personal brand you have to keep people semi-interested in the content that you post. Lucky for me I spend quite a bit of time on the topics of startups, venture capital, economics, and other web related topics, so most of my thoughts usually revolve around these topics.

This graph below shows how many different web 2.0 tools fit into the scale of personal exposure on the web. I’ve found that this scale goes from strictly ‘Consume Data’ to the extreme of ‘Live Interaction’. Along the way are levels such as ‘Sharing data’ to ‘Sharing thoughts’ to ‘Sharing yourself’.

Where does your comfort level sit? If you haven’t thought of this before, you may be able to tell how comfortable you are by looking to see which of these services you use.