Half A Dozen Online Personas


Unleashing Bold Initiatives

I was chatting with a friend one day who’d asked if I was on some website or another. I said that I was and that my username was such and such. But I realized later that I’d given him a username I was using on another similar site.

After a quick email to sort things out, I took an inventory of my various online personas and was shocked to find I went by no fewer than half a dozen different usernames. I had names from when I’d first gotten online, names from before my cartooning career, names after, names in various social media… It’s a lot to keep track of.

It didn’t take long after that for the above cartoon to occur to me.

8 Comments ▼

Mark Anderson Mark Anderson's cartoons appear in publications including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. His business cartoons are available for licensing at his website, Andertoons.com.

8 Reactions
  1. Omega 3 Supplements

    I have this same problem when it comes to online bill pay. Why do we make it so difficult on ourselves.

  2. I’ve used “plutopsyche” as a varient of “Psyche” for fourteen years. It’s only in the past few years I’ve started using my real name.

    I won’t tell you how many domains I own though…that’s a whole ‘nuther problem.

  3. Ive gone by Andertoons for as long as I can remember, but I do have a slew of old usernames that I still occasionally have to dredge up. Ugh…

  4. Having all those names floating around out there in cyberspace doesn’t do much to promot and support a personal brand, tho’. In the long run, one, even if it is something ‘created’ and not your real name becomes more recognizable and easily related to the ‘who you are, what you do and why you have value’ parts of a brand.

  5. Martin Lindeskog

    Mark,

    I have several usernames too, e.g., Lyceum, Lyceum1776, EGO, Lindeskog. Have you checked out the username check service by KnowEm?

  6. Mark,

    You are right on! Between all my user names and passwords I have to use my Daytimer to have any chance to get back onto web sites. If I would have realized when this web site sign-up stuff started how it would mushroom maybe I could have tried to use the same user name for all sites. Too late now!

    Thanks for a great article.

    Teresa