Part One: How To Ruin Your First Impression

This post is the first in a five part series addressing the separation of one’s personal and professional profiles.

Should you separate all of your social media personas? Have just one social media persona? Or create a hybrid of those two options? During this series, I’ll be taking a look at a few things you should consider when planning your personal and professional social media presence.

The business world has been a buzz since the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) ruling last week on a Chicago Salesman’s firing stemming from Facebook posts posted on a lark while at work; it ruled in favor of the employer (read more on the ruling @ ABA Journal). In this day and age, most companies have published social media policies, rules and/or procedures.  One would “think “most of these policies would just be common sense, but again and again you hear stories about people getting fired over social media posts.  Now that the NLRB is addressing the issue, those policies will most likely become more standardized within Human Resources.

For most people, watching what you post publicly on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube from or about your company may seem rather obvious. To keep your personal and professional social media lives from intersecting, you might even have separate Facebook and/or Twitter accounts that you use for business than you use with family and close friends.  A big mistake we see happening is that people use their professional (work) email addresses when setting up their personal social media accounts.  Here’s an example of how this can backfire on you.

Rapportive is a handy tool that you may add to your gmail account.  It shows all of the social media connections tied to an email address right in your inbox, including a profile photo, Facebook Status, LinkedIn account and the last several tweets from any associated Twitter account. Several of us here at Intrapromote use Rapportive with our e-mail.

Imagine our surprise when we received an email meeting invite from a sales rep who just happened to use their work email address to set up a fake Twitter account for a local meteorologist.  To make matters worse, their tweets were laced with F-Bombs and mentions of “body shots”.  Probably not the first impression this rep was looking to create.

No, we didn’t accept the meeting invitation.

And can we just say no to creating a fake twitter account? #badform