How To Manage Multiple Personalities Online Without Going Crazy (Hint: It Involves Gmail, Twitter and FriendFeed)

Just for starters, I should point out that this article isn't about dealing with multiple personality disorder by using online tools. I'm sorry to disappoint.

But what it is about is figuring out how to manage multiple online brands and blogs without going crazy.

You see, for many bloggers, writers, and full-time web-workers, one of the hardest things we deal with on a daily basis is maintaining multiple personas online for marketing, conversation and promotional purposes.

Now if you only have one or two sites and they are owned and run by you, these can probably be promoted, bookmarked and discussed using a single coherent brand on the likes of Twitter, Friendfeed and Digg. That's what Darren from the Problogger network of blogs does, for example.

But what about when clients hire you to blog for them on their site, and expect you to promote and optimize that content too using social media as part of the deal?

Or what if you just want to use different, relevant usernames for each site to help optimize them for search engines? 

Then, before you know it, you're juggling multiple browsers and hundreds of tabs, trying to keep up with two or more different online identities, each one with its own group of friends and followers and its own conversation threads: Next stop, white padded room. 

That is, unless you could somehow pull all of these together in a way that allows you to view all the input and respond from one central location...

Two Problems, Two Solutions

This topic has been on my mind lately for a couple different reasons. First, I will be launching a new blog for one of my clients this coming week and so I had been thinking about how best to promote that new content without confusing my own personal brand.

Then, my friend Alexis Siemons from the My Tea Cups blog, mentioned that she was getting increasingly frustrated by the same problem. She had been trying to set up new social media accounts to promote her great new blog about etymology and words over on The Hatchet (an online magazine) called, naturally, The Word. (I think she's on a two week trial there, so head over and take a look and if you like it, leave a comment.)

Anyway, the point is that she was having issues, too, particularly with Twitter's one-account-per-email rule.

And as I see it, that is one of the two main issues we deal with when trying to maintain disparate social network accounts online: Doing so requires too many email addresses!

The second challenge is that the accounts themselves are too difficult to keep updated after you've set them up successfully.

Let's take a look now at how we can deal with each of these problems in turn.

I Don't Want Another Freaking Email Address

I'll use Alexis' problem as a point of reference here again: She already had two email addresses - one generic ISP and one Gmail - and didn't want to set up another one just to create a new Twitter account for the new blog.

Fair enough.

Of course, with Gmail being free and coming with automatic-forwarding baked right in, it wouldn't be that difficult to set up a new account, and then just redirect it to your main one. But why add another email address to your growing harem when you can just use Gmail's dot hack to trick Twitter into allowing multiple usernames for one email address? 

I won't go into great detail about what the Gmail dot trick is, because it has been covered quite well elsewhere, but the Cole's Notes is this: when you sign up for a Gmail Account, you are actually reserving not only your username, but also every variation you can create by inserting periods.

So if your email address is johnsmith@gmail.com, email directed to john.smith@gmail.com, j.ohnsmith@gmail.com, j.ohn.s.mith@gmail.com all go to the same inbox. Nifty, eh?

(My apologies to John Smith for exposing your email in four different iterations to the spambots, but let's face it, I probably wasn't the first.)

Now how can we use this trick to fool Twitter into letting us have multiple usernames all tied to one email? 

Quite easily: Just sign up for one name with your regular account, and another by adding a dot (and another and another if need be, using as many email variations as possible.) 

I've tested this, and it works like a charm.

What I haven't done is a full scale analysis to see if the same tactic will work on other Social Media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and the like, so your mileage may vary. But maintaining brand association on services as content-critical as Twitter or other microblogging platforms is often the most important piece of the blog promotion puzzle anyway.

In any case, I will be doing further testing in the coming days as I prepare for the new blog launch, and will keep you posted on what I find.

Now For The Hard Part

Of course, while having all your Twitter (or other social network) updates directed to one Inbox does alleviate the management stress somewhat, we are still faced with the arduous task of following and contributing to all those dislocated conversations.

But not to worry: This is where FriendFeed can come in handy.

If you haven't heard about it, FF is an innovative service that acts as an aggregator for all your online activity, and that makes it a perfect tool to track and manage multiple accounts on Twitter or elsewhere.

Using the Twitter example, you can easily add your multiple accounts to a single FriendFeed stream with a couple clicks. Then you can easily track both threads in one window. (And in one browser too, since you would need to use two to be signed in to two different Twitter accounts at once.)

To make things even better - FriendFeed even allows you to reply to Tweets you receive in your stream, and will show those replies as coming from the Twitter account where they originated!
How cool is that? 

So that's it- wasn't so painful, was it? Now you can easily manage as many online personalities as you need to all in one central location.

Just make sure they don't start talking to each other and everything should be just fine.

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What about you, how do you deal with managing your different identities online? Do you have any need to do so? Can you let us know if these tricks will work with other non-Twitter social media sites? The comment form awaits your insight!

DISCLAIMER: This tip can obviously be abused for dishonest and spammy purposes, but that is not the intent of this article at all. Don't use it for that. Come on. Nobody likes a spammer.