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Theresa Regli

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Beware the social networking news feed

24-Jul-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Facebook, LinkedIn

A few weeks ago, I was having drinks with a friend of mine who'd recently separated from her husband. She hadn't told many people the news as of a week before we met up, but then she changed her relationship status on Facebook. A broken heart icon declaring that she was no longer married appeared on her profile, and immediately she was bombarded with phone calls and emails from concerned friends. She was mortified, as she didn't realize that changing this piece of information in her profile would go out via her news feed.

I saw this as an isolated incident, until it happened again today to another friend of mine who's apparently separating from his wife. In fact, unlike the previous occasion, I found out from Facebook. It was a lousy way to find out that a couple may be on the road to divorce -- as it would have been a lousy way to find out any other piece of "serious" or "sensitive" information. But there it was in my Facebook friends news feed. I learned from a mutual friend that the dissemination of the news was unintentional.

And what about enterprises that use Facebook as a corporate intranet? Could it be that employees are also unaware of such automatic information distribution? As readers of The Enterprise Social Software Report know, it's difficult to separate professional from personal information on Facebook, which has also had a history of privacy and security breaches. Though you can now categorize friends and decide who gets to see what information, I admit, I find it crazy that in this day and age, people still think that things published on a social networking site will go unnoticed, or not be disseminated. Unless you specify otherwise, you should assume it will not only appear on your page but distributed to every close, personal Facebook friend you have. All 347.

If you mix work and play on Facebook, don't be naive. If you're going to sip wine while naked in a hot tub in California, don't write about it on your wall unless you're comfortable with everyone knowing, including your boss, your ex, your clients, and anyone else you may have thought it was a good idea to "friend."

In this blog, I once linked to a colleague's Facebook page, and then was contacted by his company's PR firm, insisting I switch the link to the person's profile on LinkedIn. I accommodated, but was also perplexed. What I'd said about the person was nothing but complimentary. It was clearly an issue of not wishing to mix work and personal information. But really, it's too late. We're already there, thanks to Facebook, thanks to the legions of social networking sites on the web. Social software doesn't let you control the dissemination of every piece of information about you out there -- yet. If you don't want people to know, just don't publish it. Anywhere.