What do you think is the difference between your professional brand and your personal brand? Well, think about who you are at home and when you’re out of the office. How do you spend your free time? And how do you like to interact with your family and friends? That is your personal brand.

Some people really don’t want their professional and personal brands to ever intersect and that’s a choice. Now, most of the people who work with you, either with you or for you, want to know a little about you. It reassures them to know something about your off-duty side. In fact, a colorful off-duty story about yourself in the right way can help you build your word-of-mouth marketing and make it memorable.

For example, have you ever known someone who was an executive Monday through Friday in a pinstripe suit and a perfect red tie or whatever color tie of the year is? And then the weekend is the best Harley rider? There is nothing wrong with that. So if this person wants to be the Mr. Executive during the week and a Hog rider on the weekends, that’s great. That is a clear professional brand and a clear personal brand.

We just want this person to be careful, neither his family nor his company wants to see him on the news at a bar fight. And we certainly hope he doesn’t join the Hell’s Angels. But if you took a charity trip or went to your son’s race day in his business suit and on his motorcycle. Come on, how cool would that be?

On the other hand, here is a story of an IT project manager who had an unfortunate collision between his professional brand and his personal brand. And it is something like this. This project manager worked for a company that distributed laptops to its employees. And they were quite forgiving of the use of the laptops. They allowed off-call resources to take laptops home even if they weren’t traveling. And the company even allowed resources to use laptops to access their personal emails and visit some websites.

Of course, people were supposed to do this outside of business hours. Then one day when a meeting was about to start and most of the attendees were in the room, this project manager who was going to facilitate the meeting blurted out an unfortunate confession. “I come from human resources,” he told the entire room. “I almost lost my job. The desktop support team was working on my laptop and they found pornography. I knew I shouldn’t have let my son borrow that laptop.”

Wow, too much information, clearly not managing your brand. And what do you think people walked away thinking about him? Because half the people probably thought it was their son and just as well, you know, he should have better controls over his son, but I bet you some of those people walked away thinking, “Yeah right dude, you got caught. , no? “

Look, what is the best way for a politician to lose his job? Get caught doing something in private against what they have sworn to be in public. People will Google you. They will find your website. They will find your blog. They will find your MySpace page. It’s great to know about your hiking club. It’s not so great to see photos of you drunk dancing dirty or close-up photos of your private tattoos. So the general rule of thumb is that if you don’t want people to know, don’t post it online or, better yet, don’t post it at all.