Bert Buys Into Uniforms

Bert and I were having a little chat regarding "uniforms" and he wanted me to share our thoughts before I managed to sort out the rest of my aggregator musings. I think the interruption is due to his prima donna personality, but I will let him go with it since Denise and I were also recently discussing this issue.

Seth Godin has this to say today: "Let me assert for a moment that marketing is about storytelling (hence the Liars book). If you're telling a story, though, that means that in some sense you're an actor. Not that you're con artist or doing something fraudulent... far from it. But that you're an actor in that you are using emotion and amplification of ideas to make your point in a limited amount of time."

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Now see, there you go. I know Seth is talking about marketing. However, as Bert is always saying marketing is life and we are always marketing something whether it is Beautiful Betta Bites or hard working geek. Bert gets off easy without changing his uniform so he can be a bit smug. I have changes of uniform depending on whether it is a work day, a gardening day, a sleeping in Saturday.

When you are creating an online community presence, you are marketing, yourself, your business, your passions, whatever. This requires conscious thought on what you want the perception of your "product" to be based on. Outside of the Terms Of Service that may apply to you, there are other things to consider. Do you want to be the blog equivilant of Ozzy Osbourne or more like Paul McCartney? Do you want to appear to be the pierced, tattoo'd and dreamy indy coffee shop barista with a philosophy to share or do you want to be regarded more like a philosophy professor (with a job...otherwise well..coffee shop might be your platform) or do you want to be more like Coach on Cheers?

The words we use, whether they are typed or spoken are often the true credentials of your online presence. Proofreading is always a good idea but more than that...language usage is a key credential. Just like we teach our children not to use vulgarity in front of parents, grandparents, teachers; we should keep in mind that even though using such language happens more often than it did in the past, it isn't appropriate for every setting even when "being yourself". So, put on your uniform based on where you want to be and who you want to be. There have been serveral blogs that I have taken off my blogroll just because the author could not resist "swearing like a sailor" within blogs that were germaine to my daily work. I couldn't send something on to my boss or co-workers with those words. Therefore, those blogs became a waste of my time. This also applies to blogs/feeds I get that are not work related. I like to share things I find, but I am not going to share something that is impossible to read because of punctuation, because of inappropriate capitalization, or because they may find the language off-putting.