For most of my adult life, I’ve used David B. Thomas as my name. My father is David Thomas, without a middle name, so for one thing it helped distinguish us. “He was David NMI Thomas in the Army, for “No Middle Initial.”” Using my middle initial felt a bit stilted at times, because I introduce myself as Dave Thomas, and that’s generally how people refer to me.
Online I was usually dbt001, because with a name like mine, it’s hard to get an email address or username other than something like DavidBThomas3369.
When I started working at SAS in May of 2007, I arrived to find a nameplate on my door reading “Dave Thomas” and an email address to match. What the heck, I thought. I’ll just go with that.
Then I heard John T. Mims speak at the Ragan Communications Web 2.0 conference held on campus at SAS. One of John’s tips for participating in social media was to build your name as your brand. People with a common name need to do something to stand out in Web searches, John suggested. That’s why he started using his middle initial.
That got me thinking. If you search for “Dave Thomas,” you’re going to get an awful lot of search results, almost all of them not me, and many about the late hamburger pitchman. “People still insist on reminding me we share a name – I know, thanks”. If you Google “David B. Thomas,” you’ll still find a lot of people, but you’ll also find me – three times on the first page of results. So now I’ve started using my B again. Where possible, on Twitter for instance, I’ve changed my username from dbt001 to DavidBThomas. It was either that, or change my name to Marmalade P. Vestibule.
When I first started blogging in 2003, along with a small cadre of friends, we all sought to be anonymous on the Web. It just seemed like the thing to do. My blogroll included Adda, Rebecky, Mykull and Pinky. You would need to scour their sites with the acuity of a Federal corruption investigator to figure out what town we even lived in. What were we worried about, exactly?
Five years later, not only am I writing a post about my name, but I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut “I think”, Flickr and Friendfeed. If you want, you can find out what’s in my Netflix queue. I take care not to post anything potentially controversial or damaging to any of those outlets, but I don’t really do anything potentially controversial or damaging these days, publicly or privately.
Things have gone so far in the opposite direction that we’re now seeing public service announcements aimed at teenagers reminding them that anything they post online lives forever. As for my generation “X” social media seems to be teaching us it’s okay to be online and open and honest about your life and who you are. That knowledge is seeping through to the companies we work for. I’m still holding my breath for the first big “social media crisis” I may have to face. But maybe by the time it happens, I’ll be able to spend my time addressing it rather than defending our participation in those channels.
What’s the opposite of anonymity? Nymity?