Do you find Facebook a helpful tool for maintaining and growing business contacts, or are you contemplating what Harvard Online editor Paul Michelman is about to do:
“Defriend” all his business contacts.
As a business tool, says Michelman, Facebook is not working, and it’s cluttering up what he really wants the service to do: maintain his social network. Read his very funny Harvard Business Online column, Why I’m Dropping You as a Facebook Friend.
As one of Michelman’s business friends, I expect to be getting my termination notice any day now. But I can’t say I blame his reasoning — I’m thinking of doing the same myself. Facebook provides few business tools, at least compared to competitor LinkedIn. It doesn’t make me more productive (just the opposite!). And it really doesn’t expand my business network in any useful way.
De-friending business contacts, Michelman observes, “not only will it keep out a lot of noise, but it will solve another pressing problem: keeping my inappropriate friends, and the even more inappropriate friends of friends, at a safer distance from my professional associates.”
Sounds like the “Colliding Worlds” theory espoused by George in Seinfeld when his fiancee, Susan, unexpectedly becomes buddy-buddy with his friend Elaine. Suddenly George’s self-identity (not to mention daily routine) is in turmoil.
“It’s just common sense,” George explains to Jerry. “Anybody knows. Ya gotta keep your worlds apart.”
Are your Facebook worlds colliding? Is it time to you put your business world and your social world in their proper, isolated orbits?
Related Reading: LinkedIn: The Business Antidote to Facebook?
