In this great, big social-media-ish world of ours, just where do we draw the line between the personal and the professional? Do you tweet an article in your field and then bitch about your wife? How about friending somebody you met an an industry conference, who will then have access to your vacation photos? It’s a challenge sufficiently daunting that Big Names like David Brin, Scott McNealy, and Mark Zuckerberg have declared privacy to be dead. Maybe that’s true — or maybe, it’s less true than the fact that we have to be a bit more honest with ourselves about how we market our personal brand to different audiences.

Some people address the challenge by maintaining different accounts for their “public” selves and their “private” selves — even if that pisses off the powers-that-be at Facebook. I know a few people who do just that, and good for them for maintaining brand purity. But does that necessarily mean that they’re more honest and open on those super-secret private pages? I doubt it. After all, our personal pages are where we end up friended with our in-laws. If we’re willing to be honest with them in our status updates, we’re probably willing to post the damned things in Times Square.

And what about our friends? We’re probably not so open about the fact that we occasionally fantasize about spending a long weekend on a Mediterranean island with those friends’ spouses. (Or maybe you are. How’s that working out?)

To be “honest,” we almost always edit what we present to the world. We are constantly presenting a slightly polished, buffed and not-completely-open-and-honest version of ourselves, even to family and friends. The wife of one of my buddies is shocked that he slept with a dozen women before he met her; I wonder what she’d think if she knew the actual number was over fifty?

I know that it’s a bit easier for me, because I’ve traditionally marketed a pretty uniform version of myself. The very first “big” article I sold commercially was a piece published in Penthouse about working as a paid medical guinea pig in experiments involving cocaine and marijuana. Since then, I’ve written about other interesting adventures, including sex, drugs, police run-ins and the purchase of a black-market semi-automatic rifle.

My own father has written — very entertainingly — about my family’s long-standing underworld connections. Google me and you get info on him, since my old man dealt with the slow progress of cloning technology by passing his own name on to his offspring, and I made the mistake of following a similar professional path (I’m a second-generation writer — it’s hereditary and untreatable).

Which is to say, the things that many people would keep private are very much part of my professional self. There’s not a lot of separation between the “private” J.D. Tuccille and the “public” J.D. Tuccille. I find that convenient since keeping my lies straight is no easier for me than it is for anybody else, so I like to tell the same ones to everybody.

Well, that’s fine and dandy for me. But what about people who have marketed slightly — or very — different versions of themselves to different audiences over the years? John Smith v.A and John Smith v.B might be sufficiently different to cause troubles if the audience for one gets a bit too much of a taste of the other. If v.A is a straight-arrow accountant, the partying-with-the boys photos posted of v.B can be a bit problematic.

And that’s the true challenge of the age. It’s not privacy — it’s brand differentiation. We have trouble keeping straight which version of ourselves we’re selling to who.

For the moment, the problem comes down to a question of merging our brands into one, maintaining separate social media accounts (even when the rules say otherwise) or keeping the more limited-audience versions of ourselves suppressed and generally off-line.

But supply does meet demand. I have no doubt that, in the near future, social media will allow us to fine-tune our personal brands for different audiences. We’ll pick and choose just what versions of ourselves we want to sell to different people.

But I’m warning you, be careful, when you friend your in-laws, that you keep them off your BDSM list.

Or don’t. Let me know how that works out for you.

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