Several years ago I started talking about “personal brand management”. Came out of my talks with a number of people, primarily of course my lovely branding consultant fiancee, but also folks like MattB who was just beginning his nomadic hacking excursion. The idea of managing your personal brand seems awful important (I wouldn’t know for 100% sure as I don’t do a very good job), but I’ve never quite liked the phrase.

Which is why I was happy to find the term “identity work” in this article about parents failing to convince their children to use Twitter.

As in:

“The people who I see using it are an older demographic, […] who use it for work, [or] to present themselves as particular types of people. They’re using it to do identity work.”

So much more soothing, and hip sounding.