I’ve been advocating for quite some time now that you should keep your online identities separated, depending on the purpose of the networks you’re most active on. The reasoning is quite simple: your online presence is mostly divided between your business endeavors and personal affairs.
This was particularly true a short while ago (not more than two years) when your business contacts had no idea who were you dating and having drinks with and your friends didn’t really care whom you’re doing what business. (Un)fortunately that is no longer true. Every new person you come in contact with has a pretty fair online trail and if you’re like me, you’re gathering whatever information you can find on a particular person before entering into a relationship (business, personal) or a conversation with them.
Most of information nowadays is highly public (not saying that’s a good thing) and whether you’re active on Facebook or an Open Networker on LinkedIn your online trail is extremely accurate and accessible. Yet sometimes you forget to update or delete certain things from one network, information that might haunt you or damage you on the long run. Trust me, the Web doesn’t forget.
So it’s all about controlling your online personal (not private) data. Not long ago one of my peers said that in the future everyone will be anonymous for about 15 minutes. Scary, yet so true.
Last night, after reading Chris Brogan’s latest e-book (which I highly recommend, it’s a very good read for those building or rethinking their personal online presence) I came up with the idea behind the LinkedBook Experiment. Building a personal online presence is not that hard, but controlling where your shared information will end up is.
So what’s the experiment all about?
I have over 1500 connections on LinkedIn and with most of those people I’ve exchanged at least one email, tweet, private message and even phone calls. I rarely refuse any connection requests mainly because history has shown that a large business network has extraordinary benefits (on one occasion I got through to the upper management of a large corporation after two emails and a phone call and they were very happy to know that all this was done through LinkedIn – I’ll come back to this in another post).
Facebook on the other hand has much more data regarding an individual and if you’re planning to benefit from his or her expertise you’d like to know what kind of person you’re getting into a relationship with. Thus you need to know him or her both as an individual and a professional. At least that’s my view, which I know for a fact is shared by many others.
So, without getting too much into contradiction with Tamar Weinberg’s Social Media Etiquette I’ve added all my LinkedIn contacts to Facebook.
Initial Statistics
From the total LinkedIn contacts (over 1500 direct connections) about 650 have Facebook profiles and an additional 22 were already my friends on Facebook. At the time of writing this blog post (~12 hours after starting the experiment) 5% of the newly added contacts accepted the friend request and only one refused, his argument being that he wants to keep his social life separated from his business one. As I want to keep the experiment as unbiased as possible I respect his decision and I will not try to convince him to accept the friend request.
Considering that we’re so close to the holidays and it’s only been ~12 hours I’m pretty impressed with the initial results.
The goal of the LinkedBook Experiment
Simply put I would like to know how many people are aware of the fact that their online activities leave a very clear trail and acknowledge that no matter what their preferred network is, information is shared and accessible to everyone. And most of all, the final goal is to find out how many of them are really open to sharing all their information across multiple platforms. After all, our online identity is what will define us as global individuals in the coming years. Also, the results could be an initial hint whether a global SuperNetwork is a good idea or not.
I will share these results at the end of January and I will try to compile a complete and exact list of statistics.
Possible issues
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote yesterday an “intervention post” addressed to Robert Scoble. My takeaway from both posts was that information flow can be incredibly overwhelming and might badly hurt your productivity, reputation and eventually, your personal life and sanity. This might also happen with the experiment, but fortunatelly Facebook has some pretty nice filters and settings to retrieve only the information that is useful to you.
Other than that I expect only a few rejected requests, which is quite normal.
Thank you for helping!
Every individual is unique and I’m quite sure that I have something interesting to learn from each and every new contact added within this experiment. And I’m highly optimistic about the outcome of this experiment and therefore I thank you for helping me out with this experiment!
If you have any comments or advice, please feel free to share them with me, I appreciate any input.
Once again, thank you & Happy Holidays!
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image credits theletter.co.uk
I try to keep my two networks sort of separate. Linkedin is for someone who I have met through business and hopefully have had at least one meeting – in person or on phone. However, I am well aware that someone can easily search my name and find out loads about me personally. That doesn’t bother me as I’ve always been incredibly open.
The one thing I’m not sure is how your experiment will actually prove your point. What is the correlation between friend accepts and whether someone knows or doesn’t know about information accessibility on the web. Perhaps I’m missing something in the explanation. Would love to understand more.
Lisa a scris recent…rodwellian: Burned two pans of my cookies. Still enjoying the memories of Aunt Ruth and I making gingerbread every Xmas eve. Now to decorate.
Lisa,
First of all, thank you for your input. Most of the people I recently added have sent me a message stating they are glad to be connected on Facebook as well. Others asked how do I know them and what is the experiment all about. I briefly explained to all of them the mechanism of information sharing between the networks. Some of them are fully aware of their online activity trail and also agree that all information should be easily accessible within a central location.
I will compile my results from both numbers and private conversations within Facebook. (of course, no names or any individually identifiable data will be shared)