common denial

I have had this blog for over a year now and it has been a difficult task for me. Not necessarily hard to find material and talk about my passion (virtualization and security) but difficult in that I have to make myself public. Luckily I only have to make myself public from a professional perspective but as I spend more time doing this blog, I find a need to share personal information as well… things like my travel experiences or my dating highs and lows. How do I share this information without making myself a high risk? I am still trying to figure it out… to merge my two worlds. What two worlds might this be? Lets discuss how I am trying to bring social media in to my life without making me a high risk commodity and yet being successful in my job.

Let’s start from the beginning. I worked at RSA. I love security. I believe in it and what RSA Security is trying to achieve in this world and what it will continue to achieve. I believe in it! I wanted more… I wanted a bigger message so I joined the EMC vSpecialists. Wow… this was a hard role for me to take on from a personal level. You see, I had a facebook account but it was not under my given name. I had gone through some things from a personal level and wanted to stay under the radar. Now I have my co-workers (specifically Ed and Tommy) talking to be about Twitter, blogs, etc. Argh… are you serious? I have to what? To the world? And why am I doing this? Seriously Ed, you are killing me… I don’t know how to be a public person when I preach to everyone that being this public can put you at higher risk of everything! Now all vSpecialists do NOT have twitter accounts or blogs and they do a phenomenal job but I chose to jump in feet first for the most part and I am happy about that… I just watch how I do it. For instance, I try to not tweet my location and the fact that I may be away from home. I save my tweets for a later time when it comes to my amazing drive to Sun Valley, Idaho. Or maybe I send the tweet out from my completely separate personal twitter account. I try very hard to keep all my work tweets to work stuff. It is the reason why I opened the account in the first place. I want people to know me from a professional perspective. I want them to know how great the RSA DLP product suite fits in to a virtual desktop environment. I want to publicize the vShield App with Data Security capabilities and the only way to get it out there, is to write about it… tweet about it and get it out there! How else will people know. Google is the new encyclopedia platform for all the research that one can do. I don’t necessarily want to also tweet the fact that I love the new Imagine Dragons song “It’s Time”. It truly is a fine line and I keep riding it and stepping back whenever I feel like too much is out there… because you know once it is out there, it is never coming back.
Where did all this come from? Well… I was sitting on that plane to Boise, Idaho and reading “Wired” Magazine. I got half way through the May 2012 edition and had already read two articles about twitter and I had not even gotten to the Google article. I was blown away to see that a Klout score could get you free items . A Klout score is based on twitter tweets, retweets, etc. and other social media tools. The second article talked about computers writing articles based on tweets and data… data… data. These are amazing articles… you have to read them. All of this made me realize that social media is out of control and not necessarily in a bad way but it is here to stay and in order to accept it and be a part of it, you have to be more open. The fact is I want to tweet about RSA products but I also find that as I am more vocal about that, I want to be more vocal about other aspects and maybe if people know more about you… they will accept your thoughts better. Honestly, I have no idea but I know that I love my job… I truly have the BEST job in the world but I love my privacy too. I love the fact that I have created other identities for my various roles but I have to realize that one day, these worlds may mesh and we need to figure it out without the compromise. Social media isn’t going anywhere and we need to figure out how to make it… or maybe I do… I don’t know… it stresses me out 🙂