1) Some time ago, I decided to use my real name on the web, to build my professional presence. I wasn't quite unique, but any results that came up for a search on my name were pretty inconsequential. Since I made that decision, two more prominent people with the same name have come to the fore. One of whom operates in a fairly close field to my own, and the other is a film actor. This makes it very difficult to build a personal brand. If you search for my real name online, you get pages and pages of the actor. If you add a bit more context, you get the other guy first, and eventually you might find me, but you'd have to know quite a bit about us to be able to differentiate, and I know I've. If I had a sensible nom de plume, I would not have had this problem. Another mitigation would have been to try to build my personal brand a bit more aggressively at the start.
2) Before I signed up here, I started working for an organisation that requires me to explicitly dissociate my personal web activity from any activity I might undertake in the name of my employer (i.e. my opinions are my own, and do not represent...). If I'd had the account here before then, linked to my profiles elsewhere, then I'd have to add that kind of guff to my profile here. Personally, I think that making it unlikely that anyone would link what I say here to my employer is better than explicitly highlighting that I don't speak for my employer.
Comments
Two anecdotes in favour of using a nom de plume:
1) Some time ago, I decided to use my real name on the web, to build my professional presence. I wasn't quite unique, but any results that came up for a search on my name were pretty inconsequential. Since I made that decision, two more prominent people with the same name have come to the fore. One of whom operates in a fairly close field to my own, and the other is a film actor. This makes it very difficult to build a personal brand. If you search for my real name online, you get pages and pages of the actor. If you add a bit more context, you get the other guy first, and eventually you might find me, but you'd have to know quite a bit about us to be able to differentiate, and I know I've. If I had a sensible nom de plume, I would not have had this problem. Another mitigation would have been to try to build my personal brand a bit more aggressively at the start.
2) Before I signed up here, I started working for an organisation that requires me to explicitly dissociate my personal web activity from any activity I might undertake in the name of my employer (i.e. my opinions are my own, and do not represent...). If I'd had the account here before then, linked to my profiles elsewhere, then I'd have to add that kind of guff to my profile here. Personally, I think that making it unlikely that anyone would link what I say here to my employer is better than explicitly highlighting that I don't speak for my employer.