Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Social Media & Work/Life Balance Part 2

Problem #2 Can you represent your work life balance in your social media use & still be professional?

I am a person who uses Twitter, and Facebook in both a personal and professional capacity. In my personal social media accounts, I often talk about both work, and my personal life, because I am a whole and multi-dimensional person. Many of the professional connections I have made are because people have gained an understanding of both sides of my life. They are also parents, like I am or they have lived in Boston, or California like I have or they love dogs like I do... I can go down this road forever, but for some reason my work and my life intersects with the work and lives many others thus creating stronger business /personal connections.

Yet I am still hearing about people being reprimanded by their managers for this type of behavior. I have heard about people being chastised for talking about their sick child, or their plans to attend a social/professional happy hour on their own personal pages.

Managers, as long as your employee is not being vulgar, defamatory or obviously inappropriate please try not to scrutinize their every tweet or post. If they are also using it for business, they are cultivating an audience, and connections beyond the ones you can reach with press releases, or billboards or banner ads. I think they used to call it "word of mouth"? Don't make them follow the advice below.

Social media users, try to think through your posts and tweets, write them like a micro blog to your audience. Let them get to know you as both personal and professional. If you continue to have problems with backlash from managers, try setting your permissions to private, and remove your twitter feed from your Facebook updates, or blog.

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