Personal vs Professional in Social Media

I am back home after having spent two long summer months in Europe. I have been embarrassingly disconnected, but my social media reflections haven't been completely switched off though. For example, even if I would have wanted, I couldn't have missed the Facebook scandal that filled the media for a couple of days when I was in Sweden.

In Sweden EVERYONE is on Facebook. And so are the employees at the National Immigration Office. The scandal was about an employee that had published a "what's on your mind"-update with a racist undertone. This was seen by another employee at the immigration office, communicated to the direction, and the racist-accused employee was now threatened to lose his job. The man said in interviews that he did not understand why the phrase was experienced as racist. He was also shocked over all this attention that this little meaningless text got.

Well,

1. Things are not longer what they are, they are what they seem
   
2. One person does not get to chose what's meaningless and what's not. Loads of people chose together what they find interesting and meaningless
   
3. And at last, times have changed and our private and professional persona has merged.

It was pretty interesting to hear that the man, a middle aged white-collar worker, was so confused and surprised over the whole situation. It is not unlikely that his intention with this Facebook note was to be ironic or humoristic as if he was talking to his own circle of friends.

But there is little place for irony on Facebook. When a text is published it is up to the readers, all of them (!), to judge what the meaning is. It does not matter if there was another intention with the message: The things are not what they are, they are what they seem for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds… of readers.

If it is on Facebook, and it is interesting enough, everybody will know about it. This opens for a huge potential, for us in marketing, communication and media. But if you are a middle-aged immigration office worker you should definitely avoid to make tasteless jokes about immigrants, it is pretty likely that this will be considered interesting, in a negative point of view, by a lot of people. And when a lot of people think that, and mainstream media pick it up, it is difficult to stop.

Weather it was irony, a tasteless joke or a serious reflection by the immigration office worker, it certainly raises the question about a person's private and professional persona in the social media sphere. As Facebook reaches well over 500 million users, and as many people counts hundreds, even thousands, of people to their Facebook friends, the common use of Facebook must be reconsidered. What exactly do we want to share with hundreds of "friends", and how personal can we be when our colleagues (maybe even our clients, our customers, our audience) are in our group of friends? Our personal and professional personal are merging. When using social media as private persons at home we always have to think that we don't contradict the professional persons we are at our day jobs. Private and professional contradiction is no good match in social media.