The Death of Privacy Online: How Social Media Can Kill Your Career or Business

I’d like to start by saying that I am a big advocate of living your life without dualities. Put another way, a friend of mine recently said “if you can’t be honest about who you are at work, within reason, your job is dehumanizing”. I agree with that 100% but think that there are some employers, sponsors and clients who will take issue with certain aspects of your personal life and social media – where many of us chronicle aspects of our personal life on a daily basis – can bit you in the ass if you don’t manage it and understand how it can turn against you. This posting will explore this issue and offer some solutions.

Let’s start with the inspiration for this story – an article that I just read about a young woman who is part of an “alternative” sexual community who thought she was using social media to talk about her lifestyle under a pseudonym that could not be tracked back to her real name. Unfortunately, a third party site linked her pseudonym’s Twitter account to her real name and when her boss Googled her name, it made the connection between her and some extremely graphic tweets. [LINK]

Putting aside for the moment the fact that it is ethically questionable to fire someone for their social media activities (especially when it makes no mention of her employer, where she works or what she does for a living), we have to put ourselves in the employers’ shows. If you were an employer and you found out that one of your employees had an extremely controversial online personae that could potentially be traced back to the fact that they worked for you, what would you do?

Now looking at it from your perspective, there a few things to consider that we will go through in order:

Am I Living A Dual Life?

The first thing that you need to consider before you start trying to sterilize your web presence is why you feel like you have to do that in the first place. Occasionally, we have to wear masks at work and pretend to be something that we’re not – like interested in what your co-workers have to say. Our survival in the workplace depends on it. That’s just office politics.

If you’re pretending to be someone that you are not – like the girl in the article I linked to above – the psychological strain will be unsustainable for very long. I have seen every iteration of this imaginable:

- Fundamentally shy people pretending to be outgoing because they think the job calls for it
- Vibrant people pretending to be dull
- Highly intelligent people pretending to be dumb because they think it is more fitting of their station

It’s incredible what people will do to fit in sometimes. It’s all the more tempting to do during a tough economy when you’re not confident of the job market.  I have always tried to be myself all the time – at work, at home and with my friends. I wish I could say that it’s been 100% successful but there have been social and professional situations where I have suffered from my lack of play-acting ability. Overall, I am better off for it – happier and more successful because the people that choose to do business with me (warts and all) are excellent customers who are concerned with the quality of the work, not how much the consultant strokes their ego.

My advice is be yourself during the job interview. Go in there relaxed and be yourself. If they hire you, it means that they like you for who you are. If they don’t hire you, you’re better off without them. Keep looking. Same goes with clients and stakeholders. You want to surround yourself with people that you can be genuine with.

Your Online Personae

While I am a big advocate of being yourself at all times, I am not suggesting that you don’t filter what comes out of your mouth at work. Far from it. I’m the kind of guy that believes you should avoid talking about three big things with anyone you have a professional relationship with:

1. Religion
2. Politics
3. Sex

My reasoning? These are topics that people are incapable of being rational about. Opinions on these matters are very strong and it’s very easy to offend someone with your point of view. Your friends and family will forgive you for thinking differently than them. In the working environment – you can go from reliable employee or trusted partner to massive liability in an instant. Trust me, I know. The article about the sex blogger that got fired from the charity is a prime example. They had no problem with her work but her candidness about her sexuality online was the deal breaker for them.

Here’s my advice – everyone needs an outlet for these things and the internet is a great vehicle for blowing off steam and getting into debates with people about sex, religion and politics. Create some pseudonyms (online personae) for yourself and have fun. Just don’t sign up for these accounts using anything that can be related to you. Don’t use a real name. Put a false age. Pick a different city in a different part of the world as your location.

When you are posting, don’t say anything about where you work or what you do for a living or if you do, keep it vague like “I work for the government” or “I am an entrepreneur”. What you really need to watch out for is where you surf from – DO NOT SURF THE WEB FOR PERSONAL USE AT WORK. Even if you have a pseudonym, people can trace your IP address back to your employer and report you. Your employer shouldn’t have too much trouble putting the dots together.

Can Your Pseudonym Be Traced To You?

As careful as you think you’ve been, you may have slipped up. If you’re worried about it, use the following tools to search both your real name and your online personae:

Pipl.com

Knowem.com

If you haven’t done so, also check Google. If you find something that makes you unhappy, find a way to close it off. For example, the first time I used Pipl, I discovered that an embarrassing Geocities site I had created in highschool was still up. I had to contact the people at Geocities to get it taken down because I’d forgotten the password over a decade earlier. It’s not a big deal of one of your online personae come up but try searching for a combination of some of your usernames and your real name in Google.