Personas and Alter Egos in Marketing and New Media

This week in the private writing workshop I'm teaching, we are discussing the use of "personas" and fictional alter egos in creative writing, especially for marketing and new media. There are a lot of reasons to take on a persona as a writer. Sometimes adopting an alter ego or a fictional presence can assist us in dramatizing something dry, like insurance (think of the Traveler's Insurance dog guarding his bone), or can help us make a story more vivid and attention getting (such as the "Evil Wylie" twitter feed).

A persona or alter ego can also provide distance for us as writers from what we are saying. This is especially useful if you are doing a rant, or taking some outrageous position that you'd never want to put in your own voice. Poets, like Pound and Eliot, have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, so this is nothing new.

However, these days we all swim in a large ocean of digital print and other media where we are constantly adopting new stances and new positions that vary depending upon which format we are using. A blog post might be long and thoughtful and authentic, for example, whereas a Twitter feed or YouTube video might require swift, attention-getting impact in order to be noticed among the avalanche of tweets and cute cat videos.

Obviously, you don't want to offend your intended audience, or attract the wrong kind of "eyeballs." Adopting a pornographic avatar might get you more traffic on Twitter, but that's probably not the sort of traffic you want.  However, you also don't want to work long and hard on a marketing platform, or media campaign, only to have it get lost out there on the web.  Everyone is waving their hands for attention online. How are you going to stand out beside that skateboarding bulldog?

When you are trying to reach an audience these days, it's hard to fight your way through all the noise. There's such a haystack out there, ready to hide your needle. Perhaps it's this need to fight through the weeds, but new media and marketing today seem especially full of "cute" personas and fictional characters, such as the E*Trade Baby, the Aflac Duck, and the LOLCats.

There also seem to be plenty of outrageous "stances" designed to make a point or draw attention, such as Twitter feeds like Shit My Dad Says or Stuff Hipsters Hate. Often these feeds get hugely popular before it is revealed who is behind them. Usually there's a writer back there somewhere, plugging a book, though that fact often gets lost.  Which is, of course, a risk for the writer--You might become more notorious than respected.

Still, I think personas can be extremely helpful to dramatize problems and situations, and help make them more vivid. So if you're writing about something dull, like why you might need insurance, what could be better than putting forward a cute terrier worrying over his bone? Or telling a little fable about a guinea pig who has the same problems as your clients.

Of course, whenever you take on a persona or an alter ego, you are always going to open yourself up to the charge that you "aren't being authentic," or that you are "fooling" people. That's what I often hear when I teach this subject in my writing classes, particularly if I suggest to my students that they might want to take on different "personas" for the different roles they assume online. My students often find this notion offensive. They want to believe that they can "be themselves."

But the truth is, even they aren't being themselves.

My students often have well-groomed images that they tend on Facebook and other sites. They also adopt different styles of dress when they see their parents, go out to a club at night, or show up to a job interview.  While I, too, like the idea of authenticity, I think that slavishly adhering to always "being yourself" can be very limiting, and can thwart the creativity you bring to your writing.  There's a much bigger risk today that your work will simply be ignored than there is that you will be accused of misleading people because you happened to adopt some creative stance or persona online.

Writers, I'd love to hear about the personas and alter egos you've adopted. Has using a persona undermined your "authentic" work or limited you in any way? What has your experience been? Have you gotten into trouble for pretending to be someone other than yourself? I would love to hear actual experiences from other writers in Comments.