Are you having the same trouble that I am? Is you social network a mish-mash of professional contacts, friends, family members, acquaintances, friends-of-friends, celebrity links, and a bunch of other people that you either don’t know or can’t classify?
Several years ago (a lifetime in technology), when I started down the social networking path, I had a macro strategy (imagine, me with a strategy) to keep meaningful separation between my “professional network” and my “personal network.” Sounds simple doesn’t it? The plan was to use Linked In for all business contacts and use Facebook for all personal messaging. To take this one step further, my goal was only to accept LinkedIn connections from people in the learning and learning technology space and not to dilute the network with general business contacts or friends.
This worked well in the beginning and I befriended well over 1200 learning professionals in short order. Initially Facebook was just for family and friends. But, then came the dilemma. What do you do when a business contact sends a friend request on Facebook and when a friend sends you a LinkedIn contact? Slowly, the lines began to blur.
Fast forward to today and I’ve run into a problem. What kind of communication should I be sending out through these co-mingled sites? So far, I’m still sending information about vacations, playing with the band, funny stories, jokes, political opinions, etc. on the Facebook side. I rarely comment on professional topics and issues on Facebook. My friends and family would likely say “What and huh?” In fact, there was a brief discussion the other day on my Facebook wall about whether or not Instructional Design is dead. It was a very odd mix of professional colleagues making their point and friends with comments such as “ah, so you are the one’s to blame for e-learning” (from a personal friend).
I notice that the learning thought leaders in the space keep that business focus on Facebook. Check out Josh Bersin’s profile or Elliott Masie and you’ll find them using Facebook to keep their Facebook friends up to speed about what’s going on in the industry. I’d admire their focus.
All this leads me back to the central issue of how to organize and use social networking for the right purpose and at the right time.
In most of my blog articles, I try and make some point. I have an entirely different motive for this one. What is your secret? How do you find balance between a personal and business social network? Do you try to maintain both? Do you keep them separate? What’s wrong with sending out both personal and business information?
Help. I’m looking for your advice.
–Bryan
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Great minds think alike! Same strategy for me Bryan. Do you follow Erik Qualman? I found out he’s a fraternity brother – I’m supposed to speak with him, I’ll pose the question!
Hi Bryan
About 2 months ago I took the step to remove all professional contacts from Facebook, and took the time to ensure I was connected to them in Linkedin. I now update my status on Linkedin with business relevant updates, and keep my FB account for family & friends.
I feel more comfortable being ‘myself’ on FB as a result, and personally reply to any FB requests for contact from my professional contacts that I only use FB for personal use, but then request that they contact me on Linkedin for a professional connection.
Didn’t you notice – you were cut ??? LOL!
I’ve pretty much given up trying to separate personal and professional. It’s impossible to control if you want to be authentic. And, at some point everything about you will be online anyway. Might as well just put yourself out there and let connections filter what they want.
This topic has been torturing me! I realized I messed up the process from the beginning on FB, when I let work colleagues into my “friend” space. I have been considering sending those work-related contacts a kind message on FB politely saying, “I am separating my professional and personal contacts and I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn.” Then of course, I would have to delete them from my FB friends list. I know I have many of those mixed reationships who consider me their friend who I will in some way offend….
ARGH! I have not taken action yet. I am still debating the pros and cons with myself.
One pro that I am seeing in FB is that it is a “new” toy of the 40 + age group. Being that I live in Italy, I am connecting with friends and old associates that are new to social networking and with whom I just can’t bump into walking down the street.
This dilemma, although, has certainly changed my interaction on FB. When it was just my friends, I felt free to submit comments, data, and photos. Now, I always think – do I want this work associate knowing this about me and my family? The photos of my personal time off? The photos of my child? My comments have become limited. I have many friends who are very restrictive on FB about who they let in for those very reasons.
I understand what Janet wrote above – the lines blurr… Even at work the lines blurr – you may share a personal issue with a colleague while talking to them. But it is a whole other thing (in my opinion) to have it written “out there” where it can be digested and interpreted by those who only vaguely know you.
I hope someone else can contribute to this blog which will induce me to get off the fence!
P.S. I forgot to say I even have a cousin who put up 2 FB accounts. One which is for “any one” but she posts limited data there. The other one is for the tighter inner circle of family and friends.
Hi Bryan,
You are bringing up a great point that I feel has not received enough share of attention in all the social media conversations out there (and they are plenty). Obviously, I don’t think there is a black-or-white answer. As Janet said, personal and professional lives are intertwined to start with, and with everything getting online at lightning speeds, there are no boundaries anymore (blurred or otherwise).
However, there are serious stakes at play here both at personal and professional level, so some things should be taken into account with everyone’s social media presence. Authenticity, common sense, standard/accepted practices, ethics, and legal considerations are the most important ones, IMHO. So, fine tuning our balances on the different social networks (by the way, my personal business/personal use ratios are 100/0 for LinkedIn, 80/20 for Twitter, and 20/80 for Facebook) may not be a viable end goal on its own. After all, it seems technology is quickly making all these social networks highly interconnected.
Cheers,
-Alex
Emma;
I didn’t know you’d dropped me from Facebook. I just went and checked. What I find most interesting is that Facebook doesn’t notify of dropped friends. I couldn’t even find a record of the drop. I’ve always been a bit reluctant to clean up my list, but that may be a good idea knowing that it is somewhat invisible.
Thanks for the tip.
–Bryan
I think Emma’s is a great way of handling the situation. But at this point, i am very much following Janet’s footsteps!
I use FB entirely for friends and family.
I use Linkedin …just in case … professionally only
I use TweetDeck to subscribe to tweets from
#dHinchcliffe on Enterprise 2.0 IT Architecture,
#aMcAfee for Enterprise 2.0 General insights and
#RJacquez on Adobe Tools
- also context depend Search-columns for example a conference or a topic I’m working on
In addition I use an RSS Reader and Evernote for clipcs, quotes and illustrations and subscribe to a few newsletters.
Hey Bryan – was just going over some of my RSS reading, and caught this post of yours.
I actually did a bit of an analysis on this exact topic and came to some conclusions. (you can read it here: http://www.danpontefract.com/?p=184)
For me, I found that Facebook is my lifecasting channel, Twitter is my mindcasting channel, and LinkedIn is (mainly) simply a business contact channel. You will see some overlaps here and there (for me, particularly between LinkedIn and Facebook – about 12% of my contacts overlapping) but I tend to do a good job of keeping things separate.
Hi everybody,
I operate a very basic separtion :
Facebook for friends, family and ’social’ networking (including politics)
Linkedin : business (which sometimes interfer with social / politics)
Twitter : general stuff and very little use.
Myspace : music and artists.
And I refuse ALL invitations from other networks : 4 is enough !
In my opinion, I think that it is very hard to find a balance between a personal and a business social network. I do not have a business social network at the moment, but I think to maintain both, you really have to be very organized and private. Because you have to know exactly what to say in each of those websites, in a way that it will speak out to your audience. I think that you have to leave separate this part of your life, because you never know who that person that you added on facebook from the company will turn out to be. On the business social network you should talk only about business and on the personal network you should talk about your leisure. So, please, keep them separate.
I couldn’t agree more with your dilemma Bryan. I am struggling on a daily basis to keep my business social networking separate from my personal social networking. When I first signed up for Facebook and Myspace years ago I didn’t really worry about keeping them separate because I was only using social networks for personal use. Now, years later I have hundreds of business friends that are now on my Facebook and I really have to watch what I say and post. The days of making wisecrack jokes on my Facebook wall, or posting a controversial picture are long gone. For me to be able to do this again and have both a business and personal place to social network, I would have to create another account and re-friend all my contacts. This is just not practical at the moment. Another big concern about not separating your business social networks from personal ones is you could get fired from your job saying or posting the wrong thing. A perfect example of this is a lady who posted on her Facebook that her job was “boring”. Her boss saw what she posted and was fired shortly after.
Hi, i think at first when social networks came into life it was easy to separate them for personal and business use, but now as Janet said it is impossible to separate them. the reason is Facebook first was for personal use but recently it has changed the rules of the game, like by having business pages there, u want to be fan of some business pages and benefit from the posts being shared there, and when u share that same thing there are friends (business friends) in your network who would also benefit from that share! so i think we should agree that personal and business networks are becoming the same and in near future people who still separate them from each other will lose a lot of opportunities there. As recently seen Facebook is becoming the main competitor of Google so this shows how much news is being shared and accessed through Facebook and among those there is also news related to your professional business life which is more circulated among like minded people than your friends and family members.