Your Private Life and Your Professional Life are the Same Online

Rating: 5 after 2 votes

You’ve heard it before: Much like a work-related function versus a happy hour with friends, there are different rules of protocol with a LinkedIn interaction (professional) versus a Facebook interaction (personal). In fact, according to this recent poll, 43% of people believe personal and professional social networks should be kept separate.

Good luck with that!

While common sense dictates that I don’t post photos of my kids on LinkedIn, and I don’t post my resume on Facebook, the belief that your personal life and professional life are separate is pure fallacy. It's just augmented online. You must treat every public online interaction, whether in a Tweet or on your Facebook wall, as available to anyone, and permanent. “But wait”, you say, “Facebook is for my friends, not for people at work.” OK. Then what do you do when your boss friend requests you? How about a critical client? Are you going to ignore them? Like I said, good luck with that.

The thing is, it isn’t daunting to blend the personal and the professional, if you are authentic and exercise good judgment in all facets of your life. That’s the real reason for authenticity; if you are fake, and you have any kind of online presence, eventually you will get sniffed out. If you lack good judgment, well, that’s going to bleed into your professional life also.

You also need to get used to it. The successful knowledge worker will seamlessly weave work and personal throughout their day, and the most successful will find the proper balance between the two, embracing the flexibility it provides in their lives. Whether you are answering e-mail while you wait in line at the bank, or having a conference call while you drive to your parent's house for dinner, every knowledge workplace trend points in this direction. The sooner you embrace it with our 2009 tools, the more prepared you’ll be with the tools of 2012 and 2015.

So, now that we have that settled, next week I’m going to talk about how businesses should embrace the interweaving of the public and the private as well, and how they can attract the best knowledge workers by embracing it.

Tags: cto, facebook, gillespie, jon, linkedin, network, networks, professional, revolution, social

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Comment by Andy Swingley on November 19, 2009 at 8:46am: Great post! Online brand management has it's place but if you are actively having to separate the two personalities, you should take a look at the overall self. It has to be really hard if your personal life leaves a bad taste in an employer's expectations. I don't think it is the picture of the kids that is turning your employer off, it's the Peace signs while you are jugging beers at the local strip club that makes an employer go, "No thanks" If you are looking for an Ultimate Career Lifestyle, you have to find an employer that matches up with all of you.

If I see one of my employees on Facebook post a derogatory remark about their job or the Company, I immediately engage them with "Are you ok?, what happened?, How can I help?" As an employer you also have to manage your image as a leader.

Companies and employees have a lot to learn about brand management...we both have work to do, personal and professional

I have more to learn here I feel.....looking forward to next week's post.

Comment by Jon Gillespie on November 18, 2009 at 10:04pm: Michael: Thanks! I think people just overthink it sometimes.

Tammy and Eric: Unfortunately, a lot of businesses are a long way away from getting there right now. They want people to work the long hours, but they also want to reward "butts in seats". The key is flexibility. Like everything, progressive businesses will adopt to it quickly, and other businesses will never change.

Comment by Tammy Colson on November 18, 2009 at 2:53pm: Have been thinking heavily about how to engage leadership teams to embrace the ability to manage the demands they put on their leaders with those leaders personal lives, even when it cannot apply to front line workers. I'll be interested to see your thoughts on the personal/professional blend on your next post.

Comment by Eric Winegardner on November 18, 2009 at 12:43pm: This post is spot-on, Jon. Challenge will be in convincing the business world to embrace the whole employee. I will anxiously await the wisdom in next week's post on that very topic.

Comment by Michael VanDervort on November 18, 2009 at 12:04pm: Good commentary, Jon. Someone at work was just asking my advice on this last week, and I said almost the same thing. But you posted it. Well done!