One of the tasks I’m doing for my new business client is managing their social media. This is a piece of cake, since I’ve been active on Facebook, Twitter, et al for years — especially for the MOMocrats.
And there’s my dilemma. Partisan politics has no place when conducting business. And while I have a right to express my political views (and have no intention of stopping), I think it’s only appropriate in my personal space. My clients and their customers don’t want to know what I think of Obamacare, and frankly, I don’t feel the need to tell them.
I am also wary of those instances where corporate tweeters got in trouble for controversial updates that offended half their stream.
This isn’t a problem with Twitter, where my tweets go out under the company account. It’s not really a problem with LinkedIn, which only gets limited feeds from SoCal Mom. But Facebook is another matter. I am now administering the company page there and it occurred to me that I did not want any of my MOMocrats posts to bleed over to the news feeds of the people I’m now working with. Yes, I can set privacy settings that would limit my status updates just to my friends — but I am likely to begin adding new business colleagues and clients to my friend list.
Besides, we all know how much Facebook respects your privacy. They change their terms all the time and your settings along with them (and rarely notify you). Right now, I go into my privacy settings monthly to see how they are set and regularly discover that they’ve changed without my knowledge. It’s a pain.
So over the weekend, I decided to create myself a second Facebook profile under my company email address. And then I friended some of the people from the company.
And then I realized that “Donna Mills,” with her whopping TWO friends, looked fake. And a little bit creepy. So I sent friend requests to about a dozen family members and close friends and posted a status update explaining why I had created the second account.
The following day, I received a text from another good friend (not one of the original dozen) asking me why Facebook was suggesting she friend me when we were already friends? After I explained the situation to her, I checked my email and discovered that about 20 people who are on my “real” Facebook friends list had also asked to friend my other account.
As of now, “Donna Mills” has 46 friends and the requests keep on coming.
I don’t think any of them are going to see a lot going on with “Donna Mills.” For one thing, she’s a lot less vocal than “Donna Schwartz Mills.” She posts links to general interest articles that may be funny and status updates that don’t say a whole lot. And I have a feeling she’ll be calling attention to a number of videos she’s making touting the joys of Microsoft products (Did I mention that the client is an IT company? “Donna Mills” is about to become an expert on everything coming out of Redmond. “Donna Schwartz Mills” is still in love with her iPad and iPhone.)
How long can I keep up maintaining two separate Facebook identities? For a long, long time, I hope. In the meantime, if you are already a Facebook friend of “Donna Schwartz Mills,” you don’t need to prove your love by friending “Donna Mills,” too. But if you do, maybe you want to show the company Facebook page a little love while you’re at it? I’d truly appreciate it. 🙂
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THAT explains it! I was sure we were already friends. How could we not have been after all these years??? Whew!
Of course we are! And I love ya for friending me again. 🙂
What a pain, although I completely understand your need to have two Facebook accounts. If I see the other “Donna Mills” I will just ignore the button to “friend” you! 😉
That’s a great idea to check your FB privacy settings once a month. I should do that too! Seems to be a necessary evil nowadays since they keep flipping the script on us.