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How have you managed balancing your online life (blogging, twitter, flickr, yelp, facebook, etc) with your professional life (clients, bosses, people Googling you?). Have you started to change what you write for fear that it will impact your career, or do you view what you do and write as apart of what you bring to your career?

I've recently had many clients become "friends" with me on Facebook and twitter. And I'm living these questions right now. Would love to know if you've dealt with similar things and how you've responded.

thanks,
Zach
www.quiverandquill.com

Tags: blogging, branding, job, publicrelations, socialmedia

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Permalink Reply by Jessica on June 25, 2008 at 11:34pm

Hmmm. Well I kind of have a bit of a balance between personal and professional because I work in social media at my job so my boss is very supportive of me blogging and reading blogs at work. She reads mine as do many of my colleagues but i never blog directly about work and I don't really censor myself. I try to think with a filter, like would I want my boss to see this but at the same time, I need to be myself and be true to that. I've made it clear to those who want to read it that it's me in my PERSONAL life and not professional and if they are offended they shouldn't read it.

So far so good. But yes, sometimes I do alter my language slightly so I don't come across too crude for my co-workers who do read it.

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Permalink Reply by Nathan on June 29, 2008 at 6:48pm

This is a question I'm personally tackling at the moment, and it's done horrors to my writing. Since I just got a new job in a very prominent position, and my new team reads my blog, I have to filter what I write but not so much so that it loses its edge.

It's been a difficult task, so much so that I've been debating whether I should start blogging anonymously just to write without the need of a filter. Perhaps that's claiming defeat, though.

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Permalink Reply by Elysa on December 3, 2008 at 1:52am

I realize this in an old discussion but it's something I've debated about for a while. I finally broke down and decided to create a professional Facebook account. It is the nature of my business to be involved in social media so it was seeming pretty rude to ignore people's (especially potential clients) friend requests. So my decision was made and I now have 2 facebooks & 2 twitters - I wrote a post about what I call internet schizophrenia.

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Permalink Reply by Scoman on December 3, 2008 at 2:24am

I have my Facebook profile with all privacy things set to very high.

Whilst I might be nice to my clients in the office, I wouldn't want to have to deal with them as friends.

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Permalink Reply by Madame Lefty on December 3, 2008 at 11:45am

I only reveal so much about my public life and not out of fear of a potential employer, but because I don't think it's everyone's business to know what certain aspects of my life are like.

If I wanted to be that open, I'd join a reality show.

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Permalink Reply by Date Girl on December 3, 2008 at 1:35pm

I try to keep them separate. That's a big reason I blog anonymously, because I don't want to censor myself. I like to think that my professional life is just that, and I keep it as separate as possible from my personal life.