New Facebook Privacy Settings: Protecting (or enhancing) your brand

People seem to be pretty nervous about the new Facebook Privacy Settings, which are explained here on the Facebook blog and here on a Facebook-created video. This post, "10 New Pivacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know" from All Facebook does a great job detailing the changes. Kaliya Hamlin wrote a post on ReadWriteWeb outlining how she believes that Facebook broke their contract with users (Thank you to @peterscampbell for pointing me in the direction of Kaliya's post).

Although people seem to be reacting strongly to this new move, I think most of the reaction is more to the fact that people are nervous they will accidentally leave things open to the public that they only want seen by their friends. It is more of a, "what of my personal life should I allow my extended network to see" question than a, "what should my privacy settings be" question. And, it is not a question that should be taken lightly.

While this debate over public/private information is being played out over Facebook, it is a concept that reaches over all of social media. The social part of social media is most important, but how much should you share about yourself when representing your organization?

Facebook Fan Pages purposefully don't list administrators, so that the Page can be a reflection of an organization/company/brand and not of a single person. On Twitter, organizations are trying to figure out whether they have staff tweet from their own account, from an account that indicates they are with the organization (Holly Ross, executive director of NTEN tweets from @ntenhross), or from an organization account (Laura and I both tweet from @Idealware).

There are many options and considerations, but here is what I know about how people should think about privacy and how they portray themselves on social media channels:

1. Social media needs to have a more human touch than traditional media (see Idealware's Laura Quinn's post on social media tone).Therefore, people need to feel that a human is behind the words, even if they don't know exactly who it is. But, they should know who that person is whenever possible.
   
2. Some people's business and/or organization is their personal brand. Those people need to be most careful about how they portray themselves. Yet, is also more important that those people are true to themselves when presenting their public face/brand. (See this must-read post on hotel mogel Chip Conley's struggle with maintaining a presence on Facebook, and Mashable's post on How to Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook).
3. As the world becomes more and more networked, its is difficult to delineated "work Kaitlin" from "personal Kaitlin." And, people will still see you as representing the organization you work for when they are looking at your personal profiles. I've had people friend me after giving seminars. This is good for connections and meeting new people, but not as good for keeping personal interests or activities private. For some people this works in their favor, for some not.
   
4. If you don't want your funders, clients, boss, or mother seeing something, it shouldn't be on the internet, and it definitely shouldn't be viewable by the general public. It probably shouldn't exist, but it is too late for that. This is a little more difficult for those of us who started Facebook pages before we were in the workforce, when we thought only our friends with .edu email addresses would be able to see our profiles. This has changed, and the way we portray ourselves needs to as well.
5. You, and your organization, need to give as much information as you feel comfortable giving, but no more than that. If you don't feel comfortable having information public, no matter how harmless that information might be, don't make it public (seems like common sense, right?).
   

In sum, we need to find the thin line between protecting our privacy, and how we are representing our organizations, and allowing people to better know us and understand us.

In my efforts, most of my Information tab on Facebook is public (except for some personal contact information). My friends list is also public, but my wall and photos are closed to only my friends. That is what I feel comfortable with, and it seems like a good compromise between public/private information.

What do you think? How does how you portray yourself in your personal profiles affect your organization? What information are you leaving private/public? Please leave your comments and thoughts in the comments.