Facebook Friends | When Professional and Personal Collide : Adworkz

Sorting professional from personal

(Photo: geekandpoke.com)

There’s a certain element of satisfaction that comes with knowing that you have a growing friend list attached to your social networking profile. But I’m sure you’ve wondered (or someone has asked you) whether or not the people on your list are actually “friends.” Many of us who set up social networking profiles initially do so for personal reasons. The first friends we recruit may actually fit the definition of friend. But over time, acquaintances begin to creep in. Sometimes, you even accept friend invitations from people who you don’t necessarily know well – like business acquaintances – but don’t want to offend by declining.

Sounds reasonable, right? Yet it’s only reasonable when you have a friend list of manageable size and the friends who have access to your personal profile are people with whom you’d want to share that kind of information.

Should your friend that “friend?”

A recent Chicago Tribune piece posed that same question. For people on Facebook, the flood of information that comes from having a large friend list can be overwhelming. Do you really want to add someone you may have worked with once but likely will never again, considering that you’re going to see everything they put on their wall?

It’s a tricky decision in terms of online etiquette

You don’t want to be rude, but you also have to weigh the pros and cons of the situation. A doctor was faced with the dilemma of whether or not he should add a patient whose baby he had recently delivered.

“The anxiety I felt about crossing boundaries is an old problem in clinical medicine, but it has taken a different shape as it has migrated to this new medium,” he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Having access to his personal blog could enable his patient to see everything, including photos from a holiday party. Would she use that to call his medical judgment into question? It didn’t turn out that way – he was curious as to the ongoing health of the baby and the patient was going to med school and wanted to pick his brain – but the potential for mayhem is there.

What about invading that personal life?

If a professional acquaintance lists their relationship status as single, would this prompt business relations who otherwise would leave well enough alone to approach them for a date? It gets rid of that social barrier, which could cloud an otherwise professional relationship. Thus, many businesses advise employees who use social networking as a part of their business to be cautious what they post to their profiles.

But Facebook and similar services can do good things

For instance, the Tribune points out that a group called Doctors for Obama pooled together on Facebook in order to collect ideas about health care reform so that they could submit them to him in an organized fashion. Facebook was a useful political tool in that instance (although whether that endeavor actually brings change remains to be seen as of this writing).

In general, social networking can bring groups together with positive results. Some personal filters are necessary, merely in the interests of etiquette and propriety. If you’re careful about what you post, all you’ll have to keep in mind is the size of your list, which is easier said than done!

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