Facebook | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

SMUG Research Project: Facebook Professional Privacy Best Practices

As an online institution of higher learning, Social Media University, Global has two elements in its mission:

To provide practical, hands-on training in social media for lifelong learners, and
To conduct research that advances our understanding of the business applications and implications of social media.

In Facebook 210: Professional Profiles, Personal Privacy I offered guidance for people interested in using Facebook for one-stop personal and professional networking.

Now I’m inviting all SMUG students and others who are interested to join me in testing those recommendations so we can learn together whether Facebook’s variable privacy settings make it safe for both kinds of networking.

Please do check out that course for the full rationale, but here’s the short version of my recommendations for how you can use Facebook’s variable profile access settings to minimize the risk of having your co-workers, supervisors, customers, clients or other professional associates (such as journalists for people working in PR) stumble upon something on your Facebook profile that would be potentially embarrassing or unprofessional.

Create a “Professional” friend list in Facebook
For your existing Facebook friends, add any of your professional associates of the types described in the paragraph above to this “Professional” list.
In your Privacy settings, add your “Professional” list to the friends who are excluded from viewing certain potentially problematic profile elements. To my mind, these would include:

Basic Info

Personal Info

Photos Tagged of You

Videos Tagged of You

Your Wall

If you don’t know how to create these exceptions, check out slides 11 and 12 of the Facebook 210 presentation.

I think these settings will alleviate 99 percent or more of the possible problems anyone might experience by doing their personal and professional networking on the same site.

But let’s find out! If you add me as a friend, I will do likewise to you. I’ll make you one of my Blog Friends, which is a list I have set up with the same profile limitations as my Professional friends. Then you can see for yourself if anything about me that shows up in your Facebook News Feed is potentially problematic. I’ll do the same for you.

I would really like to find out whether using these settings can prevent your personal Facebook activities (and those of your less-professional friends) from causing work-related problems, and I hope you will help.

So I’m starting a research project. Please go to the SMUG group in Facebook, and join the discussion board on this topic. Indicate your willingness to participate, and then all of us can add each other as limited access friends. Hopefully, we’ll get a critical mass of friends in this class, so we can look at each others’ profiles and watch our news feeds, and see whether we run across anything that could conceivably have career-threatening implications.

I’m betting that with these settings as I have described above, we’ll be just fine. I’m not doing a $100 SMUG challenge as I did with Secret Groups; let’s just call this a metaphorical bet. But maybe we’ll see some additional tweaking that might be necessary.

And after a month of so of not having any problems (or after having made adjustments that we find are advisable), we may have a set of Professional Privacy Best Practices that would enable people to use Facebook for both personal and professional networking.

Then you will be able to fearlessly invite your co-workers, customers, clients and other professional associates to be your Facebook friends, and will be able to use the collaboration power of Facebook to enhance those relationships and to enable you to work more effectively together. You’ll have closer relationships and provide better service.

In this way, I hope SMUG can add to the academic body of knowledge about social networking, and can practically contribute to society by helping to drive adoption of a single multi-purpose platform for networking.

My research thesis is that Facebook can be that common platform. Let’s see if we can prove or disprove that thesis.

Perhaps this could be project in which the Society for New Communications Research could participate. I also will be trying to connect with others who have an interest in this issue of personal vs. professional networking. If you know people with such an interest, I hope you will invite them to join the research project.

Facebook 210: Professional Profile, Personal Privacy

Note: This post is part of the Facebook curriculum at Social Media University, Global.

I have written previously that the ability to segregate personal and professional friends in Facebook will be essential to its growth into the all-purpose social and business networking platform. I also said this separation was logically required if Facebook is to accomplish its goal of accurately representing real-world relationships in the online environment. The reality is not all friends are the same.

Facebook made some progress toward this goal in December when it introduced Friend Lists, which enable users to group friends according to common characteristics. So, for example, here’s my list of Friend Lists:

But that only accomplished half of the goal: grouping is great, but the real need was to have different privacy settings that enable users to fully engage in Facebook personally and professionally without worrying about their work colleagues or customers getting “too much information” about their past or present extracurricular activities. What if a high school friend writes on your Wall and calls you by a nickname you’ve tried to put in your past? Or a college buddy tags you in a picture that you now find embarassing? The only solution was a single limited profile.

About a month or so ago, Facebook took the next step by enabling users to specify different privacy settings for particular groups or individuals. At the time, however, some users said the settings were hard to figure out. And I was busy at the time with launching a new work-related blog, so I didn’t have time to work with it.

Now that I’ve explored the privacy settings, I have to say Facebook has done a good job with implementation, and I’ve developed this 200-level course for Social Media University, Global students. The slideshow below includes an audio track, in which I describe:

The societal trends that support development of a unified personal/professional networking platform
The barriers to adoption of such a platform
How Facebook has addressed the potential concerns
How I have implemented these privacy controls to create an all-purpose networking site on Facebook, including the rationale for which portions I have made off-limits to professional friends.

Homework Assignments:

Join Facebook if you haven’t already done so, and enroll in SMUG by joining this group.
Add me as a friend. I will add you to my “Blog Friends” list, which has the same privacy settings as my “Professional Friends” list.
Create your own “Professional Friends” or “SMUG Friends” list in Facebook, and adjust your Privacy settings either according to what I’ve done, or in a way that makes sense to you. Add me to that list.
Send me an e-mail message when you’re created that list and adjusted your privacy settings, and I will reply and send you a screen shot of your Professional profile in Facebook.

In this way, Facebook can be both your souped-up Rolodex (and the way you represent your personal brand on the Internet), while still allowing you to make personal, non-professional connections. LinkedIN, by contrast, only allows one kind of connection: professional.

What do you think? How would you adjust your privacy settings for professional networking in Facebook? Are there still elements in Facebook you would like to be able to make off-limits to professional colleagues and customers?

Facebook and LinkedIn in Media Relations

This morning I have the pleasure of presenting at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. My co-presenters are Chuck Hester from iContact and Valerie Jennings from Jennings PR. Chuck will be focusing on LinkedIn (here’s his profile, and mine), while I will do the Facebook portion (please feel free to “friend me.”) Valerie will wrap it all up.

If Chuck and Valerie want to upload their presentation to Slideshare.net (a site you should check out), I will be happy to embed here. Meanwhile, here’s mine:

I’m including below links to some of the web sites I will reference in the presentation, so you can see the actual sites (vs. the screen shots in Slideshare) and relive the magic.

I will revise and extend, but here’s the basic presentation. Here are some of my earlier writings that outline some of the potential I see for media relations through Facebook.

Putting the “Relations” in Media Relations

“Cheers” for Medical News

Toward a Medical News Community

I believe that with the long-awaited granular privacy settings Facebook has implemented, this will become much more practical. People will use Facebook increasingly for business when they are able to more effectively segregate what information is available to their professional contacts and what is more personal. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

Bulldog Reporter on Facebook, Twitter

I’m attending the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco today and tomorrow, and tomorrow I will be part of a panel about using Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. Our focus is particularly on media relations applications, but I’m sure that some of our participants will be relatively new to social networking sites, so we’ll touch on some other uses for social networking sites, too.

Thanks to Critical Mention, I believe we will have wireless internet in the meeting rooms, so I’ll be live blogging as many of the sessions as I can.

One way I like to do this at conferences is by setting up Facebook groups, so attendees can experience social networking first hand, without leaping in and setting up a brand “fan” page. So I’ve set up a Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 Facebook group. This will be an opportunity for attendees and exhibitors to continue their networking after the summit is over.

I’m less experienced a live-Tweeting through Twitter, but will be using the hash tag #mr2008 for my Tweets. For more information on hash tags, see this fan wiki. I also understand I can get live updates from other Tweeters by using track mr2008 (provided any others use that same tag.) If I find out that others are live blogging or Tweeting and using other tags, I’ll post those, too.

The conference agenda looks great, with continental breakfast starting in about five minutes. Time to grab some coffee!

Launching the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Blog

In my work for Mayo Clinic, my major responsibilities are for our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge syndicated news products and for leadership of our social media team. Last week I wrote about our Mayo Clinic fan page in Facebook, which has been successful so far. After a low-key start, we’ve seen strong growth in our number of fans, with 376 as of this writing, and have also had some gratifying wall posts. Check out our page here.

Now we’re starting our first major blogging initiative, as part of our Mayo Clinic National Symposium on Health Care Reform, which will be held next week in Leesburg, Va. You can read about it here.

I hope regular readers of this blog also will check out the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Blog, and will participate in the discussion. While we had a low-key start with the Facebook fan page, I expect the Health Policy blog to get active much more quickly. With live streaming of the general sessions, with a high-profile keynote speaker and moderator in Tom Brokaw and with the work that has gone into developing a first-rate program, hopefully the blog will have high visibility.

I’m planning to connect with bloggers who write about health policy, health reform, health insurance, health care quality and related issues. We also will be linking the blog from the symposium site starting next Monday, so people can watch the streaming live (or archived) video and share their ideas.

You can subscribe here to RSS updates from the symposium blog, or click here to sign up for e-mail updates.

What other suggestions do you have? How can we most effectively engage people in this health reform discussion, so we can begin to build the consensus for effective health reform?