Should You Change Your Facebook Name Post-Marriage?

I can tell I'm not the only one wondering whether to keep my maiden name if I get married someday. I enjoyed reading several introspective perspectives from women on Brazen Careerist, which featured my post about whether to keep your maiden name in the digital age.

In follow-up to that conversation, here is a post I wrote for Examiner.com offering some ideas for women who want to keep their digital brand strong post-marriage. I'd love to hear more thoughts and suggestions.

Occasionally the Facebook news feed pops up with a name completely unfamiliar to me. I have to click on her picture and then realize, “Oh right, that’s one of my best friends from high school! She’s married now.” I know it’s sad, but I’m sure I’m not the only person who gets confused when people I rarely see get hitched.

The debate over whether to change your name when you get married is not new but has new aspects in the digital age. Do you really want people to not know who you are? On a professional level, that could negatively affect your digital brand.

Here are a few possible solutions for newlywed women who want to keep their digital brand strong in the digital age:

1. Keep your maiden name and your new name on Facebook or other sites (even if you aren’t actually going to use your maiden name legally). High school alumni publications have been doing this forever, and it’s very helpful so that people know who you are.

2. Create a Google profile and then specify an alias with your maiden name so that both results come up in Google searches.

3. Consider keeping your maiden name in professional venues and your new name in more personal venues (e.g., maiden name on LinkedIn, new name on Facebook). However, that raises the question about which social networking venues are personal and which are professional, which a Forbes.com writer found difficult to determine.

4. If you are single but planning on getting married someday, you might factor that into creating a Web page. Perhaps you can brand the in a flexible way. For instance, instead of www.janesmith.com, try www.jane.com or www.janewriting.com. (With the way domain names fly off the shelves, you have to be creative anyway.)

5. Or, you know, you could always just keep your maiden name for everything or nothing. The latter choice is great if you are trying to rebrand anyway. (Just do me a favor, and at least put your maiden name somewhere in your Facebook name so I remember who you are.)