Should you mix personal and business blogging?

Andy Wibbels is writing about mixing Business and Personal blogs and this is something very pertinent to me because I started blogging by creating a personal site and I’ve only been biz blogging for a few months now. I’m really interested in how many (or not) of my personal blog readers have come over here and how many new readers I’ve picked up here that I never would have over there. While Wibbels is positive about mixing it up

My background is as a creative writer/playwright so I have a certain ‘license’ (licentiousness?) to be a bit nutty on my personal blog – and this spills into my business blog. I’m nuts about politics lately (reading my 6 years of blogging shows my transformation into being more political aware) and know that in a polarized, fundamentalist, rapture ready country like we have now, that might turn folks off. At the same time if someone is completely turned off by that and doesn’t want to work with me – they probably aren’t going to be any fun as a client anyway. If I wanted to work with assholes, I’d stay in the corporate world.

Other bloggers aren’t and I’m frequently fascinated by how either/or the discussion tends to become in double quick time. It’s not about one or the other for me – it’s about the boundaries between them. I’m sure I’m revealing lots of “personal” stuff here even though some commenters may be a bit disappointed that this site is not revealing enough. But that’s because we tend to view “personal” in a particular way. I’m not talking about dating, my family life or what I had for dinner. BUT if I could draw a business lesson from any of those activities then I just might be. Life doesn’t neatly break down into what’s personal and what’s not- we bring our personal stuff into the office and what happens in the office is frequently personal. I’m all for drawing lines between experiences – but the context in which we’re operating; the relevance of the line and the lesson we’re trying to learn are all important considerations.