Question: I just heard a horror story of a colleague who became Facebook friends with a senior scholar in her field only to completely offend her when a non-work friend posted on my colleague’s wall. I know it’s important to use social media and online resources to network, but when is this a good idea and when should I NOT do this?
Answer 1: Ouch – that’s embarrassing! Clearly this issue is one of increasing importance as our reliance on online resources, including social media sites like Facebook, increases. Since you cannot fully control what your online friends post on your wall, the best policy is to keep your online personal life separate from your work-related online activities.
It is obviously very difficult to have multiple Facebook accounts but one option is to use Facebook for your personal (non-work) socializing and a different social media site, such as LinkedIn, for professional contacts. Personally, I try to avoid “friending” colleagues on Facebook or LiveJournal and I never friend students or former students on those accounts. My professional contacts are all made on LinkedIn and I never do anything there that I would not want colleagues or students to see.
Even if you do separate your virtual personal and professional lives, it is important to remember that if it is out on the web, other people will find it (even if you don’t want them to) and that it never goes away! I recently Googled myself and up came several links to posts I had made in 1992 and 1993 to a mailing list and even a few earlier posts on some pre-world wide web Usenet groups! All totally innocuous and nothing I would be upset to have anyone read, but it supports my point – never put anything out on the web that you don’t want others to see now or in the future. That includes posts on your personal pages – you cannot always rely on privacy filters to keep out unwanted viewers. Also realize that your colleagues and/or supervisors may be quietly monitoring social media to see what you and others are saying about your university, your colleagues, and your students (not to mention what embarrassing thing you did last night!)
Additionally, of course, once you’ve posted (or emailed!) something, you have no control over it any more – it’s always possible for someone you have friended to forward your blog post to a third party, even if you meant it to be private. So that colleague that you’ve friended on Facebook may be quietly funneling the contents of your wall to the department chair or dean!
Obviously some of your colleagues may also become personal friends, which is terrific! However, when it comes to the virtual world, the basic bottom line is – keep your online work and non-work lives separate and avoid crossover as much as possible.
Answer 2: This response is from a tenured professor with a broad network of colleagues nationally and internationally, with a very active research agenda that includes many of them. I subscribe to several listservs in criminology, sociology, and others, learn a lot from reading others’ posts, and contribute when I have something to say. So I feel quite well networked with great colleagues – and get to “know” many others – through conferences, listservs, and reaching out to people connected to the work I do. With all that notwithstanding, I do NOT have a Facebook account. I did have one a few years ago, but the burden of privacy concerns, loads of FB friend requests from people I didn’t want to “friend”, and a security breach led me to weigh the benefits with the hassle. So first, I would suggest you do not have to be on FB or other social media to network effectively. It’s a choice, not a necessity. If you want to be on FB, and maintain a professional exchange there, then I suggest you do the following: create a separate FB account that is for your non-work friends, as you say, and “unfriend” all the people on your current account who are not professional contacts. You can use a different version of your name and refriend those non-work people there. Keep your personal and professional contacts separate, and if you get overlap with inappropriate comments, then unfriend the person who is causing the problem. I know I do miss some funny anecdotes and social-quasi-work-related posts since leaving FB, but I don’t miss it at all. Whatever goes on FB is forever, so just judge how you want to manage your boundaries, and know that you can have a great network of professional colleagues without FB, Twitter, and other very public online venues. Hope this helps!