The Inovis Blog

As businesses continue to expand their acceptance and utilization of social media, we are constantly challenged to define who we are to what on-line communities.

We have all seen the recent rash of headline news stories about employees being disciplined or even fired because of things they have posted on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or other commonly known sites.

So I pose the elephant in the room question: what is the advantage of social media to business, the individual professional, and the individual person at the personal level.

Image Source: http://www.allfacebook.com

In the beginning of social media, I believe things were pretty clear cut.  You knew if you posted something on YouTube, the world would see it, but if you posted something on Facebook or MySpace, you could control who saw it through controlling who had access to your newsfeed, photo albums, etc.  Sites like LinkedIn were reserved for business only networking and based on those common understandings, we were able to keep our personal lives and social lives separated by clearly controlled URLs. . .

In essence we were propagating commonly held norms that who you were at home did not have much to do with who you were at work.

As new generations enter the workforce, these communication tools have become an obvious way to communicate across both business and social networks effectively and efficiently, from anywhere.

The issue at hand is the fact that businesses are “invading” networks that were traditionally considered to be outside of the business realm.  As CNN, Fox News, and many other news outlets have launched Facebook and MySpace pages, corporate America has followed.

On one side of the argument, employees can update their personal status and quickly switch over to a competitors Facebook site for the latest competitive information and justify the legitimacy of corporate security not blocking the site.

However, on the other side, if your company has a Facebook site and you are using Facebook at work, you have some level of obligation to be connected to the corporate FB page and open some level of access to your personal FB page to people that you are “friendly” with at work.

And there inlays the conundrum; as we are challenged to expand our social network to our business contacts, our ability to freely and openly utilize personal social becomes limited if not tainted by prohibition and temperance.

As social media sites roll out better filtering and security for groups within your access list (moving toward true LDAP controls) we can defend some of that personal space, but are we then creating the ultimate in Jekyll and Hyde split personalities?  Are we actually going to get to the point of managing the “who we are as People and Professionals” on a distribution list basis?

And that leads me back to elephant in the room . . . how much “work day” time can the average employee allocate to managing their many personalities across many social media sites, across many levels of business value. How much Business Value are we really getting out of all of this?  I can’t wait to see the results of lead generation to sales closure studies as they roll off the media machine.

I, for one, like having different sites for my many different personalities (great picture of a camping trip with my family on Facebook, professional picture on LinkedIn) and find it to be increasingly complicated to manage multiple access rights per each site.  And that is not to mention the whole litmus test process I am now forced to go through before updating my FB status. . .who did I assign access rights to? Can I legitimately complain to my wife and friends on FB without feeling backlash from “friends at work?”

So how do you manage your many faces of social media and how to you ensure you are getting Business value out of all of these sites without ending up on Dr. Watson’s couch talking through your multiple social personality disorder!