Separation of Business & Pleasure in Social Media

Most of us have business and personal reasons to use social media.

Social Media seems to encourage us to mix business with pleasure.

Forrester’s Research indicates that 51% of online Americans have joined a social network. Another 73% are consuming some form of social content on a regular basis. People are connecting with, listening to, following and collaborating with each other online at an amazing rate.

We may have personal or business accounts, and the nature of many of these sites, like Facebook, seem to encourage mixing business with pleasure.

I have a personal account on Facebook, and business accounts on LinkedIn and Twitter.  I also have fan pages on Facebook that are linked to my personal account as well.  I don’t see this as a problem, because we’re all complete human beings and we all engage in some small talk around the water cooler at work; and we sometimes talk to friends and family about our careers at home.

But this mixing can get out of hand. In the worst cases it and can compromise your professionalism at work or it can result in friends and family avoiding you because you’re constantly flogging your product.

Here are some guidelines I’ve come up with:

1) Be honest and be yourself. It’s okay to tell friends and family what you do for a living, and it’s okay to tell business associates that you enjoy gourmet cooking.

2) Equally important, respect your own privacy as well as everyone else’s. Social media is not private, even on personal accounts.  No matter what the “settings” say, nothing is secure and anything can be overheard. Don’t say anything in the social media that you wouldn’t say on a crowded airplane when you don’t know who is sitting next to you.

3) Don’t send game invitations or forward long lists of jokes or memes to business contacts. My rule is not to play games with anyone that doesn’t invite you first.

4) Use screen names and profile images that respresent you (and your company) well. Photos that show your face are best. (They’re authentic, they help people recognize you as the Paula Williams they met at a conference among the sea of Paula Williamses out there.) Getting too clever with your profile image, using an image of a cartoon character or household object,  or calling yourself a “slackerfromdetroit” doesn’t usually inspire confidence in a profile that potential business partners might be viewing.

5) Compose your posts and tweets as carefully as you would any memo or document that’s going to be sent to hundreds (or potentially thousands) of people.  Use a word-processing program to compose so things don’t get sent accidentally, use spell-check, and verify that your links are good before posting.

6) Realize that what you post is out there for good. Potential employers routinely search social media for information by and about the people they intend to hire.

7) Don’t sell stuff on social media. You can include links to announcements or blog articles or your web site, but social media is for connecting, not for selling. (Your company’s web site is for selling.) In other words, saying that your new book has finally been published (with a link) is fine as a status update or post, but I think that saying “Buy my new book!” as a post, tweet or update, is bad manners.

What are your rules for social media? This is an emerging field and we’re all making it up as we go.   I’ve probably violated a few of my own rules at times, and have made up new ones.    I’d like to hear what you think!