Mar14Written by:TBHCC
3/14/2010 6:10 PM 
It is essential to keep social media personal. Folks typically like to talk to a person and not a robot or a brand. But just how personal is personal. The 'rules of engagement' have not changed from traditional marketing to digital or social media marketing. It is good practice to tend to avoid engaging in politics or religion in business settings, for example, and this is not different in social media.
Love it or hate it the Internet is a 'permanent record' of sorts. Knowing this, here are two things to think about:
- Any tweets, postings, comments, for example, are not only recorded permanently but subject to being indexed by search engines and other content consumers in the web. In many cases, this ends up in multiple copies of the content attributed to you. There are no 'take back stupid comment' buttons on the web.
- Whether tweeting, bloggig, or commenting on blogs, most everything you share in the web are short out of context snippets. This leaves your readers/viewers like prospects to construe, interpret, and formulate their opinion about you based on these snippets.
The above is true even when you separate your personal from business. Having said that, if you do decide to make a separation by having multiple accounts or 'identities' be mindful that you might have logged in using different accounts in different places. You do not want to, for example, inadvertently be Tweet[ing] or Digg[ing] a story about your views on health care policy through your business account.
Charlie Marval | ovionx