1. Draw and maintain clear boundaries. Generally speaking, I’d use FB for personal relationships and LI for professional relationships. If you’re an active tweeter, I’d maintain separate Twitter accounts for your personal and professional activities.
2. Don’t “friend” people you work with in cyberspace if you don’t have a personal relationship with them IRL (in real life). And even if you do, I’d still be very careful. Yes, you can set up a complex set of privacy rules on your FB page, but make sure the expansion of your personal network is worth all the trouble. And if you’re the boss, you have to rely on the folks working for you to prevent you from seeing something you shouldn’t or don’t want to, so you have to ask whether the risk they won’t is worth it too.

As social media becomes more integrated into our professional lives, I expect more organizations will create private social networks that can produce the same benefits as the public social networks, but with fewer risks. In the meantime, it’s going to be messy…

Harris Silverman
http://www.HarrisSilverman.com

I believe social media doe just as much to break down these sorts of innate workplace issues as it does to create them.

It seems that the point should actually be a warning to managers that they need to be smarter than to re-judge any talent simply by what they may see on a facebook page.

With respect to Facebook in particular, my advice to candidates and employees is generally that they should use it primarily for personal use, which means they should make sure to properly establish their privacy settings. Once that’s done, they can still use FB to learn about organizations and opportunities, promote themselves as professionals, and make connections, but they don’t have to friend anyone to have a professional exchange with them on FB.

My advice to employers is to use FB to share company and job information and to have initial contact with candidates. Managers and colleagues should avoid the temptation to try to look at other people’s profiles. If those folks haven’t set up their privacy settings properly, then the “viewer” has to take responsibility for whatever they might see. And though you didn’t address this explicitly, if background screening of candidates is important, do it right. Hire a reputable third-party agency and let them follow the official channels and proper protocol to address whatever risks the employer wants to manage through the screening process.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/05/17/1440447/facebook-post-costs-waitress-her.html?

The comments, as always, are interesting too!

My take is that the post was inappropriate, and Brixx should have taken some action to make that point. Firing her may have been extreme, but we don’t know all the details.

I’m glad to know Brixx had a policy that covered this action. I would be even happier to learn that they were going to take some of the steps you recommended above, including preventative training and coaching.