Face(book)off: Your Private Versus Your Corporate “You”

Today’s blog is but a substitute. I had carefully prepared for you, dear reader, a case study of a large and complex software rollout at a large multinational corporation that would highlight some of the challenges as well as suggest some best practices when implementing an IT solution at massive scale and in a global business environment. I had won the buy-in of my business partner, an important man at that important company, and he and I set out to collaborate on a set of informative and prescriptive Do’s-and-Don’ts and Lessons-Learned. Good stuff. I was about to go Gutenberg on that collaborative body of findings (naturally sanitized for public consumption and stripped of all proprietary detail), when I got a call from my partner sounding as animated as a wild mongoose lemur (Eulemur mongoz) at the height of its mating ritual. A veritable farrago of concerns is recited why we cannot proceed with publication yet, but all variations on the same theme: not because there’s anything wrong with the piece (quite the contrary, for his employer is pleased to be rightfully portrayed in the most positive fashion), but for lack of company standards governing the approval of an employee’s “professional collaboration using social media practices.” Interesting.

Obviously there are tried-and-true means of approval for company-official communications (such as press interviews and news releases, research publications and white papers, web postings and company tweets, etc.), and similarly, companies have established guidelines – ranging from the commonsensical to the perhaps perplexing – for how employees in their private realm may or may not communicate about their employers. For example, proudly wearing your Adam-and-Eve costume minus the foliage on your Facebook Page right next to that official high-res image of the company logo will sadly not earn you the honorable mention with Personnel which you’d always hoped for (although even HR was impressed by the photorealism of your “In the Footsteps of Mel Gibson in Cancun” travelogue). However, that clear delineation between private and corporate citizenship apparently gets blurry when an employee is asked to participate in a purposefully informal communication “medium” such as another person’s (personal) blog. And although this particular blog attempts to serve a professional purpose which is to both inform and entertain in equal measure and to tackle topics with a certain professional theme (the future world of work, with a clear focus on IT), it is still “my” blog. That means it is merely a mechanism and channel for me to express my opinion which is, by definition, something personal (even if it’s professionally done or with a commercial intent), for only individuals have opinions but corporations do not (they instead issue statements, release reports, or create marketing messages, etc.).

I believe that’s the important test between the private and the corporate “you” as far as social media “connectivity” is concerned (where say your VP title and company affiliation can easily “follow” you around into your personal sphere): if it’s a matter of opinion, even if it’s your professional opinion, it’s indeed a private matter (even if and because your opinion is now public). Blogs make for a good example here, as corporations don’t write diaries either. Blogging is about the dissemination of opinion to the public, but it has nothing to do with publishing proper; it has nothing to do with real journalism (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., you’re safe, for now); it has nothing to do with the exacting standards of academic research, etc. Blogs are personal opinions that – thanks to Web 2.0 – may spill into your professional life like coffee onto a tie, for all to see. In fact, I know quite a few people who draw that distinction in their daily online lives by conducting all their personal-information sharing via Facebook, while strictly segregating their professional networking via LinkedIn. And if you see a little blue tweety bird fluttering from one to the other just let out that mean ol’ cat.

Back to the story of the temporarily suspended case study on implementing IT solutions at massive scale for Web 2.0-shy Fortune-500 companies. Being in principle a man of principles, I tell my man that I’d rather read Of Mice and Men backwards than not to move forward with publication. He then reminds me of that theoretical particle physicist at CERN who couldn’t help himself this month but make his professional opinion be known, without, however, checking with his boss first: “there can be little doubt that black hole production at the Large Hadron Collider would be an unacceptable and irresponsible risk.” Poor fellow ended up in a black hole of his own making, and we wouldn’t want our corporate friend to share a similar fate. See y’all again next Wednesday.