PR for everyone

Yesterday I read a spiffy article in Wired magazine about microcelebrity. It's not a new concept, but the term is. It refers to a person who is not well-known except to a few dozen, hundred or thousand people on the internet. The most common examples are bloggers or persons who post often on well-read forums.

Here is the article.

The same trend happens on Facebook and MySpace. Jim posts a bunch of photos online from a party and tags Joe in one of them. Some of Joe's friends who don't know Jim go check out the photos and some more of Jim's photos, and maybe his profile, too. Jim has some funny posts and memes on his blog, so a few people subscribe. Suddenly Jim is well-known to several people he has never met. The article quoted a woman who one day stumbled across a forum of 125 members (the creation of which she'd had no knowledge) about her blog. It happens.

How does this relate to PR? With our Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, Webshots, Shutterfly accounts and an increasing number of personal Web sites in addition to a person's presence on any number of forums and online games, everyone has a more well-known image to maintain than he thinks or knows about.

All these networking sites and web behaviors are most common in our age group, and the article pointed out that 20-somethings also handle microcelebrity best of any group as well.

We dress up to look good when we go out to the club, the bar or the house party because we know someone there will be taking photos, and we don't know where on the web they'll end up. We carefully select the privacy settings on our MySpaces and Facebooks so that only our friends can see the party photos, so our parents can't check up on how we're spending our college funds, so future employers can't search us and read about that hook-up. We post to our blogs on protected settings so as not to incriminate ourselves for the entire world of the web.

We're more visible than ever and naturally adapting to practice personal PR daily for our images. Most of us don't realize we're doing it. I hadn't ever thought about it before reading the article, but looking at my web presence, postings and settings, I realize how very carefully I moderate my image. And when I start applying for a job in the spring, I'm sure I'll be even more critical of what the world sees of me.