Laura:

In the realm of social networking sites, anything goes when associating an avatar with one’s profile.

I have seen people use as their avatar:

• A photo of their favorite presidential candidate
• A Chinese character
• Snapshot of their kid’s pet rabbit

But what if you know that those who are viewing your avatar include the president of your company or your boss?

Riding the wave of Facebook, companies and organizations are realizing the benefits of social networking capabilities to increase knowledge and share information.

Phase 2 has been involved in creating internal websites for several of these groups; websites that, among other things, allow organization members and company employees to post blog entries and add comments.

Unlike traditional social networking sites, these websites are closed to the public and topics are usually limited to professional and company interests.

Users of these sites have the opportunity to associate an avatar with their profile.

According to Wikipedia, an avatar is two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities.

In Our Avatar, Ourselves, one blogger muses :

“As companies and other organizations take to immersive worlds, it may be that new employees are assigned an avatar and virtual office space along with their security card and computer. Blogging is now part of some job descriptions and soon employees may be encouraged to spend time in-world for both corporate socialization and professional collaboration purposes within and across corporate lines.”

In most work environments, including mine, the choice of an avatar is left to the individual.

In posting this blog entry, for instance, I mused over possible avatar choices.

Here are a few:

Selecting an avatar associated with my career, my job, turned out to be a little daunting.

In essence, the avatar becomes a kind of digital business card. Selecting an avatar becomes potentially as important as choosing a job title or even a logo.

A picture of Bono just wouldn’t do.

After mulling it over, I came up with some basic guidelines for selecting an avatar for myself that I felt were appropriate for work-related blogging (you can see the final avatar at the bottom of this blog):

• must be a visual representation of how I look (as opposed to a photo of an interest or hobby)
• must be photo and not an illustration
• may or may not indicate interests out side the job (photo in kayak is ok)
• must be taken in the last 5 years
• must not mind if this photo was actually on my printed business card

These guidelines are completely personal – my company did nothing to inhibit my expression of myself through an avatar.

In the future, I anticipate that companies will no doubt create their own guidelines for use of avatars in their company sites.

In the meantime, I’m comforted to know that I can change my avatar as often as I like.