If it is your venture and company, I would recommend just being yourself, transparent about it all and evangelizing as you. However, there’s a fine line between evangelizing and spam, so be careful. Some folks are constantly bombarding their friends with marketing messages, which can come off as spam. While he gets a pass because of who he is and because he’s normally announcing developments in his site as opposed to just promoting it, Guy Kawasaki’s mentions on Twitter can come across as spammy. It seems like he is always pushing Alltop. Again, he is normally announcing new channels there and he is Guy Kawasaki, so most people overlook it.

However, if Guy didn’t engage folks in random conversation from time to time and it seemed like everything was Alltop-related, a lot of folks would drop him.

If it is a client or someone else’s company, I would recommend going the Zappos route and having you and the other staffers sign in under company_individual or individual_company names. RichardatDell is a perfect example on Twitter. He’s identifying himself as a Dell employee, but is a real, live person named Richard. Most of the Zappos folks follow similar naming, though they are a bit more liberal with it than I would recommend. People want to know that the profile is a person, not a company or groups of people posing as one user.

Hope that helps. Best of luck on your new venture.

Im at the beginnings of developing a social media campaign for a new venture of mine, and had a quick question for you.

Im already a member of twitter, linkedin, facebook, jaiku, friendfeed, etc. Should I use my own personal profiles on those services to start evangelizing my new venture, or should I create new profiles that are strictly venture-focused for my social media program? Seeing how well @zappos was received on Twitter has got me on the fence on which way I want to take my campaign.

Thoughts?

Gabe - Wonderful quote. Thanks for that!

Cheers.

I’m encouraged every time I see a great example like the few you mentioned or the many, many others out there. I try not to get too hung up on the people with no time or patience for trying something new, but I also try to keep in mind that there’s more to life than the Web and more to business communication than a blog. It’s a balancing act, but as I’ve said before, all of this craziness is, more than anything, FUN!