Social Media: The Unavoidable Intersection of Your Business & Personal Life

For those among you who have managed thus far to maintain good, solid compartmentalization between your business and your personal lives, I offer a hearty “Congratulations!”

Seriously. Not an easy thing to do these days. In fact, for some of us, we couldn’t cleanly sort the people in our lives into the two buckets of "business" and "friends" if our lives depended on it.

But this “blur” of personal and professional isn’t really a new thing, at all, is it?

For years, we've become friends with clients and friends become clients. Co-workers become like family. Sometimes they literally become family. It's not uncommon that lawyers/doctors wed other lawyers/doctors, etc. (With the hours some people put in, where the heck else would they meet anyone?? )

But now it’s in your face and soon to be, if not yet, in your employment policies: dealing with social media applications and the work day.

Collecting all your contacts in one place is complicated, too. There is the clear challenge of deciding how much of your personal side to bare to whom.

You might whip out pictures of your kids to show a colleague at a conference, but do you really want them seeing photos of you in your swimsuit chasing your kid (not pretty is my point)?

For those who want to dip their toe in the pool of the life/work blend (or who are already waist deep) and wishing for a way to be more selective about who sees what, you will probably appreciate this excellent “how to” on Facebook privacy through using “groups” for sorting your friends and business contacts. Read 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.

I’ll briefly touch on policies, too. Frankly, as much as companies have tried over the last decade to stifle employee access of third party email sites, interactive websites, etc, it’s simply impossible to restrict the entire internet. Why bother to lock out hotmail/yahoo when people have email and text on their smart phones??

That era is over.

And it’s dumb to block most websites, too. Disallowing Linked In, Facebook, Blogs and Twitter (yes, some firms lock down all of those) is cutting off your firm’s nose to spite its face. These are valuable marketing tools for those who wish to use them that way.

But more discouragingly for the leery employer, if you ban them, smart people who like a challenge (there tend to be quite a few of those in the professional knowledge firm arena) will spend their time finding a way to circumvent the ban.

C’mon, you were teenagers...you remember the thrill of stretching or breaking a rule just to see if you could pull it off!

So, don’t spend a lot of energy worrying about who is using what forum and instead, if issues arise at the individual level with regard to performance, then address problems one-on-one with that individual. Worry about people not getting their work done is the real issue behind the bans, anyway, right?

Today's reality is that there is little choice now but to trust the way people spend their “time” is appropriate, overall, and simply hold people accountable for the end result: either they are cutting the mustard with performance, or they aren’t.

Good luck and happy entry to this new era of life/work management.

*Hat tip to the incomparable Debra Helwig (excellent new blog: Service Minded) for pointing me to the the Facebook Privacy article and its 239 useful comments

Comments

[Ed Kless]

Great post. It is so easy to circumvent. There are several online operating systems now that allow you to create a virtual computer somewhere else in the cloud. From their you just launch a browser and bingo, no restrictions.

[Joey Brannon]

I'm scratching my head over the desire to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to privacy settings on social networking sites. Wasn't the point of joining these sites to reconnect with old friends and find new ones? When I started Facebook I had zero friends. Had I followed these privacy precautions I would have probably connected to only a dozen or so through word of mouth. The lax privacy settings are exactly what make the sites work in the first place.

The problem is that people who try to use social networking as a business tool forget that it is first and foremost a relationship tool. It works so well at fostering relationships because it promotes transparency and open, almost broadcast style communication. Strangely, it's not the generation that created social networking that is wrestling with this. They believe that if you've got to hide your Facebook or Myspace identity from your boss it's a crappy job anyway. It's those of us that didn't grow up with social transparency and voyeurism that can't get used to the fact that a so called "business tool" may require us to get real with the rest of the world and stop pretending to be someone we're not.

[Michelle Golden]

Totally get where you're at, Joey. Excellent points. I find that, for me (a 40ish chick) my main concerns for the personal/business blend are to protect my minor children on the internet--their identity and their safety. For family and close friends--people who know my family--they get full access. For business people whom I don't know very well (say for instance, you, until I get to meet you and all and know you aren't a stalker :-)) I would suppress photo albums that make it really easy to find my children's full names, schools, etc.

That is the sort of privacy I would be concerned about. People who are party age might be more concerned about the drunk pics...and if they have more serious careers (law?) or plan to be future politicians they should probably avoid those potentially damaging pics/stories altogether, but if they don't, they should at least stash them behind a wall...

thanks for the dialogue! I do agree with your points!

[Robert Fligel]

Enjoyed this post as always. I would almost title it... Trust Your Employees as that seems to be a prime issue. In earlier days it was personal telephone calls as I can vividly recall the skulking partner perusing the staff room to be sure all heads were down and billing.

The choices keep getting bigger and, as noted, the ways to circumvent "bans" are generally ahead of the curve.

Agree for sure that all of these tools can and should benefit the firm as well and should be incorporated into training. I know many who do that sort of training if anyone is interested ([email protected] or 212 490 9700)

Anyone who takes advantage should be called out whether its sick days, personal pc use or other and there are plenty of tools to monitor such behavior if desired.

[Ron Ratliff, CPA]

I'm glad I found your blog.

Excellent comments focused directly on an issue of significant interest for those responsible for growing a practice in the Web 2.0 world!