This is another follow-up to the article I wrote about on-line social networking:
http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/07/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking/
In that post, I started the discussion by posting 5 common questions people ask about on-line social networking’s use for the lab. I already wrote about the first two:
Here, I will write about the next one.
Question # 3: Should I combine my personal and professional life in my FaceBook page?
Answer:
Even the sites such as FaceBook that we think of as personal and purely social are also being used for business purposes. Employers now use FaceBook and other social tools to glean information about prospective employees, for example. Considering that there are specific questions that are illegal to ask employment candidates in the USA, but that some of this information can be found on a person’s FaceBook page, you have to think twice about whether you do really want to make some of your personal information so public and whether you want to tie it to your professional information.
Another consideration is this: when you’re at work, are there things you feel are too private to share with co-workers and managers? If so, and if you put those somewhere where these co-workers and employers can read it, they now know all these private things.
There’s a general thought that having a little personal information with your professional information isn’t a bad thing. It humanizes you and makes it easier for others to bond with you. But you need to consider which of these things are things that you really want to share with others in your professional life.
Overall, you shouldn’t be too casual about combining personal and professional items. Think twice about it to be sure that it’s something you really do want to combine. Because even though you can delete the information from the page, you can’t delete it from the minds of the people that read it or the e-mails where they forwarded the information along to others.
