On Wednesday evening I attended a talk in Manchester that was part of the DMEX (Digital Media Exchange) programme. This is a training course for television freelancers who want to diversify into digital media work. With a slump in new TV commissions, this is definitely a smart move for many of them.

The main reason I went along was to hear a presentation from one of Britain’s most prolific social media content creators, Christian Payne AKA Documentally.

Although much of what he discussed would be nothing new to the ears of most 14sandwiches readers, he had lots of advice for those just starting out on their adventures on the social web. It was the anecdotes about how he made the transition from professional photographer to social media ‘guru’ that were fascinating to my ears.

In 2005 Christian set out to make a name for himself by doing photo-journalism in northern Iraq. Flying to eastern Turkey and getting a taxi to the Iraqi border he found the Kurdish people in the war-torn country to be welcoming and keen to show him their lives. Despite uncovering newsworthy stories, upon his return to England he found no news outlets were interested in his work. Not to be beaten, he created a Youtube video of his photos accompanied by an audio commentary and suddenly people took notice.

For a man who carries two mobile phones, a laptop, a handheld HD video camera, an audio recorder and a digital SLR camera with him, one of the most important tools for his career has been his avatar. Inspired by the iconic Che Guevara image (”I’m not a Communist!”, he insists), it has stood him in good stead over the past few years. By sticking to the same bright red avatar on every social network and web service he’s created a personal brand that few online have matched.

Christian sees work as a “side effect” of the continuous online communications he’s involved in. Just by networking and sharing his life via services like Twitter, AudioBoo and 12seconds he’s managed to build a reputation that’s seen him get work promoting Bletchley Park, theatres and films, not to mention covering political events from a new social angle. Just last week he was interviewing Conservative leader David Cameron via his AudioBoo account which has a special 30 minute limit (the normal limit is 5 minutes).

The future of social media, Christian believes, will be an emphasis on what he calls “The gaps between the apps”. Portable IDs to use across multiple services and increasingly powerful filtering of all the content out there are what he sees as the most important developments currently emerging.

When it came to the Q&A session at the end of the talk I asked him for his views on the problems I discussed in this post recently – isn’t it worrying that the next generation of semantic search engines will be able to collate all the information about us online into a detailed personal profile?

Christian said that he’s disciplined in never geotagging his house and locations relating to his family but aside from that he sees no problem in throwing out information about himself. He argued that his online network is so large and strong that it is ’self-policing’. You could hardly impersonate Documentally successfully when his profile online is so high.

So, maybe the solution to the problem of personal information online is simply to embrace The Naked 21st Century and tell your life’s stories without fear. After all, it’s certainly not done Christian Payne any harm.

On a side note, one of the DMEX programme participants has produced a brilliant video diary of his experiences. If you want to see what happens when a video editor with years of broadcast TV experience turns his hand to online media take a look at Gordon Howe’s Vimeo account.