ION Digital

As mentioned earlier, we got hit with a lot of questions at the Cisco Partner conference about separating online business and personal interests and identities. People are worried about looking stupid in front of their business clients and associates by revealing too much of their personal lives.

Example: One middle aged man had just set up a Facebook account, primarily for business, and was stunned to find out his business contacts or “friends” could now easily click over to his teenage son’s profile and see his latest antics. “It’s the last thing I wanted them to see,” he said, “pics of him partying and acting stupid.”

The problem on Facebook is that anything you post goes into your friends’ news-streams—and often beyond. If you post, say, photos of you getting drunk with your football buddies on New Years’ Day, one of your friends can easily “share” it with his/her network. What if they’re connected to your son’s teacher or one of your company’s vice-presidents? Oops. Tagged photos can wind up in strange places too; amazing how this slick technology can work against you.

One option is to set up separate business and personal accounts. If you don’t want to do that–and many don’t–then check out Facebook’s privacy controls. Knowing how to tweak these controls is the best chance you have of avoiding the train wreck, ie. personal embarrassments. These allow you to tweak who sees what.

One of the coolest features is one that allows you to create customized friend lists and tailor your editorial offerings to them. You might have a separate list for family, friends, business contacts and/or business contacts by geography or second tier business and personal lists (those you lack a strong relationship with). You can apply specific privacy settings to each group—for instance, not allowing business contacts to see your photo postings.

The main idea is you control your content distribution, and avoid business contacts seeing your personal postings.

To start using friend lists, visit the friends area on your Facebook.

You can also make yourself selectively invisible to outsiders on Facebook. By that, I mean you can exempt yourself from Facebook’s search results, eliminate your public visibility. Why would you do that? Maybe to hide from people you barely know and don’t really want to connect with or old acquaintances—what about that old college boyfriend? To do that, go to the search privacy settings page. There you can customize who can search and find you: only friends, your network and friends, everyone—or just yourself.

This is just a small sampling of what you can do to avoid your personal life from spilling over into your professional side. For instance, Facebook offers tools to allow you to manage photos (through tags). But these aren’t foolproof, and the privacy settings aren’t really designed to hide things on a granular level. For more information on this issue, check out Lifehackers guide–this piece– which goes into more detail about Facebook’s privacy settings.

Speaking of control, one other related Facebook issue you need to consider, which has come into the spotlight recently: who owns your content? If you thought you owned it, you may have been shocked to read some insightful reviews of Facebook’s new terms of service which appeared to give it full rights; even if you decide to abandon FB, their rights live on. Since that critical piece appeared in the Consumerist blog Feb. 15^th, and amid a consumer backlash, Facebook has reverted back to its old terms of service, with the original clauses of protection upon expiration. But it’s something to consider as you develop your Facebook and SM strategy; what if FB’s evil twin appears again, taking back permanent control? Do you really want what you’re posting today to be available five years from now if you’re in a new business–or, hey, running for public office?

If nothing else, Facebook’s actions show that you can’t completely trust your content to this site–or any other privately owned site for that matter. No matter how many controls are available, any time you put your personal content out there, there’s a chance it could make its way to places you weren’t expecting.

Last, we heard a lot of concern last week from people who were afraid of mixing personal and business contacts. One woman feared that her new personal contacts would be hitting up on their business contacts—either to start a relationship or even try to sell them something (of course, this could also be a b2b case). The issue was on LinkedIn but could just as easily have played out on other platforms.

You’ll have to take this one case by case. Facebook actually allows you to control how much of your friends’ profiles are even visible to the rest of your network. With LinkedIn, you may get a chance to politely decline to connect your aggressive friend with a business contact—or not (it has a backdoor loophole where your friends can contact other friends). But much of it boils down to common sense. Be careful who you invite in your network in the first place; be selective, even with family members (especially family members). Then monitor activity; if one of your personal contacts continues to violate your personal rules after you warn them, drop them from the friend list. You might lose a friend, but preserve an important business contact–and avoid the train wreck.