Separating business and pleasure

At last week’s PR conference in London, Neil Midgley (assistant media editor at The Daily Telegraph) warned journalists and PRs that they shouldn’t be using Facebook for personal reasons, advocating Twitter as a more appropriate ‘professional channel’ where you can easily run personal and professional relationships. He made a clear distinction between the social networks that were appropriate for business and pleasure. I don’t want to take his comments out of context, that were directed just at journalists and PRs, but it raises an interesting wider issue and one that I frequently come across in my day to day use of social media.

It used to be the case that there was very little, if any, crossover between my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. But as my time of using Twitter has progressed, I’m starting to connect with my ‘followers’ through Facebook. Where once I used Twitter from a professional capacity and Facebook was strictly for socialising, this is most definitely starting to change. Now my Facebook feed is filled with interesting links and blog posts, as well as the mix of the usual ‘social’ updates from friends. When my communities start to mix in this way, there is less of a distinction and my online community now jumps with me from site-to-site. It’s the style of the content that changes (length, media type etc…) rather than the subject.

As more and more businesses start using Twitter and we become ever increasingly social, there is less of a distinction between personal and professional. I would have to say that I disagree with Neil Midgley. With the exception of a site like LinkedIn, which has a clear business focus, I don’t think we can say that you can easily contain one type of ‘networking’ for one site, where it is more appropriate. Like I said, the style of the content, yes, but not the subject matter or the community you’re engaging with.

Where does one start and the other finish?

Last year I decided not to integrate my Twitter and LinkedIn statuses, both for reasons of repetition, but also because I used LinkedIn for business reasons and this wouldn’t necessarily be overly relevant to my Twitter followers. That is starting to change though. I still haven’t integrated the two because I don’t like to repeat myself over different social networks, but in reality there is a ever-reducing differentiation between the content, as well as there being a reduction in the different followers I have between the sites. It’s not uncommon for me to meet someone new and receive invitations to connect over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

This is an obvious progression for social media. We are obviously just one person, whether you’re talking about this in terms of offline or online. It is becoming increasingly difficult (and ultimately pointless) to manage different types of ‘you’ over the social networks you use. The more we use social media, the more it becomes necessary for your community to follow you from site to site. As I said in an earlier post, the social networks we use are intangible. The structure and functionality is out of our control. What we can control is the content and the community and we need there to be a solid relationship for this, regardless of which site you’re using. I’m sure not many people would be too keen about their boss seeing drunken pictures on their Facebook page, but we are going to have to progress in our intelligence and realise that our personalities and the way we function online is fluid. And visible. There won’t be places to ‘hide’.