Tag: Facebook

A Tale of Two Facebook Accounts

Post author By Donna Schwartz Mills
Post date November 8, 2013
3 Comments on A Tale of Two Facebook Accounts

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. 🙂

Tags Facebook, linkedin, social media, twitter

Blather Getting Old Sucks

No More Reunions

I just received a reminder about my high school reunion, which is taking place this summer.

I tossed it straight into the circular file. As I said when I received the “Save the Date” notice last year, I don’t do reunions any longer. That’s what Facebook is for.

Besides, I’ve spent the last 40 years trying to forget the horrors of being a teenage girl at an American high school in the late 20th century — and I don’t need to spend an awkward evening with a bunch of my peers whose only thing in common with me is that we served time together 40 years ago.

I know – that makes it sound like high school was pure torture. That’s only half-true. It was also an exhilarating period of my life, filled with friends who I was convinced were all going to change the world. As I thought I would do — even though I was a socially backward skinny teen who had trouble making friends. I just knew that once I was an adult, all of that would change.

And for a while, it did. My first jobs out of college had a modicum of glamour. I interviewed rock stars for a living. I worked in television. I traveled.

And as much as I tried to forget the teenaged me, she refuses to stay buried. Today I’m a socially backward, pudgy middle-aged woman without a lot of real accomplishments under her belt. I don’t feel like affirming the opinions of those who won’t be surprised by that. That is, if anyone remembers me at all.

I might feel differently if I had moved away from here. But since I remain, a day does not go by when I am not reminded of something from my youth. Like yesterday, while driving my daughter and her friends home from a day at the beach, we ended up passing an apartment building that had been home to two of my high school friends who got married at 19. A block up the street we passed the hospital where another friend had some scary surgery. And across the street from there was the corner where another friend died in a car crash.

By the time I was 40, five of the kids I hung out with in high school had all died: Two suicides, one AIDS, one cancer and the aforementioned fatal accident. The couple that married too young eventually divorced, and after that I was dismayed to learn that the relationship had been abusive.

I suppose part of my reluctance to revisit those years is a fear of what I might learn about the real lives of my old friends.

Better to remember each other when we were young and had bright futures.

At least on Facebook, I can choose the side of myself I wish others to see.

Tags Facebook, high school reunion

Mom Life Original Blogsta

Friending the Rabbi

I’m making matzo balls today (Yes. ALL DAY. Or most of it, anyway.) So once again, I am running one of my series of old blog posts in honor of my 9/10’s of a decade writing SoCal Mom. This one seemed appropriate as I prepare for Passover. It is from February, 2009.

Yesterday, I mentioned how I’m suddenly back in the world of Facebook. I did not mention the look of horror on the face of my friend, “Elaine,” when she noted a recent addition to my list of friends.

“You friended our Rabbi?? That’s brave. I’d be afraid for him to see my conversations!” she exclaimed.

The truth is, I’m not too worried about this. For one thing, I like our rabbi. He’s smart, he’s funny and he strikes me as a very compassionate person… and while he’s obviously religious, he’s not intolerantly so. He’s exactly the type of person I would want to be friends with — if he wasn’t our rabbi.

But I don’t think he’s spending any time reading my Facebook feed. He’s got hundreds of other Facebook friends (most of whom are probably REAL friends and not just anonymous members of the congregation). And let’s be real here – the extent of our relationship has been saying “hello” when we run into each other at Starbucks. I think he recognizes me as one of the flock… but he doesn’t know my name. We are not all that active in the synagogue.

It’s not that I don’t want to be. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 50 of my 53 years, but never felt a part of the community — until Megan started school and we joined the Temple (which is located a few blocks from our old elementary school and so was the synagogue of choice for about half of my daughter’s kindergarten class and some of the teachers, as well). Even my gentile husband — who resisted affiliating with organized Judaism — loves the people we’ve met and admits to enjoying himself once I drag him over there.

But my daughter’s athletic commitment is a 500-lb. gorilla that overshadows everything else in our family. Between 16 hours per week of training, competitions and school — there’s little time for anything else. It’s a difficult balancing act, made more so by the fact that her father and I made the commitment to send her to religious school. She is supposed to go twice a week and attend a minimum number of Friday night services.

A couple of years ago, we really tried to meet that standard — but as Megan moved up the USAG competition levels and her training became more rigorous, I’ve relaxed my expectations of her in the religion department. This year, she’s only attended one Hebrew school class per week and we haven’t been to any services outside of the High Holy Days.

Even so, she’s on target for learning her prayers — and is even ahead of some of her friends in class who have 100% attendance. I know: I am blessed with a really smart kid.

I am not a particularly spiritual person. I’m not sure what I believe. I want my daughter to be free to decide her own beliefs. I think she needs to understand her religious and cultural heritage before she can do that. If my husband had insisted that we raise her in the faith he grew up with, I would have been okay with that — but it would have been HIS responsibility to answer her questions about it. (Since I know next to nothing about the New Testament, how could I be the one?) I felt that if we did not pick one tradition or the other, she would grow up without an understanding of either.

In the end, I guess I cared more about it than my husband, so our daughter identifies herself as Jewish — even if her dad likes to insist that she’s half-Christian. We can argue forever about how you are either Christian or not — there’s no halfway in religion — although you can be half-Jewish if you are talking about ethnicity. But I digress.

You see, Megan is turning 13 in April – and we’re on track for her Bat Mitzvah. This is something that was abstract six years ago, when we joined the synagogue. Now, it’s achingly REAL. I’ve written a couple of posts here, agonizing over the planning. The entire event is going to cost us about $2,000, most of that on the “extended kiddush” (lox, bagels, salads, desserts) we’ll be providing the guests after the ceremony.

We will be hosting our immediate family and closest friends at a dinner that evening, which will likely cost an equal amount. My parents offered to help underwrite the cost and I gratefully accepted, because to be perfectly honest, I don’t know where this economy is taking us. We’re living on less this year.

Altogether, this is a teeny, tiny fraction of what most people I know are spending on their events.

Aside from the catering, the next largest expense was for the printed invitations; Megan wanted something pretty and I felt so bad about giving her such a “plain wrap” party, that I got her the ones she wanted.

Now I’m worried that our friends and family will see these invitations and expect something a lot more elaborate than what we can provide. I dunno. All I can do is the best I can and I need to stop second-guessing myself.

I just dropped about half the invitations in the mail (I’m still waiting for addresses so I can send out the rest). The train has left the station.

As for the rabbi? We’re not so anonymous with him any longer, either. On Tuesday, we had our introductory meeting with him as Megan prepares for her big day. She wasn’t feeling well that day; I’d even kept her home from school. But I didn’t feel I could re-schedule our appointment with the rabbi, as this one was hard enough to get: Tuesday is the only day of the week Megan doesn’t have gymnastics and his schedule was pretty packed, too.

So I brought my sick child in to meet with him and found myself babbling apologies over and over again about her gymnastics and how tough her schedule is. I mortified my daughter by insisting that I would send him a link to video of her (which I have thought better of doing, so have not followed up).

I like to tell my kid that as her mother, it is my job to embarrass her — but I think I may have outdone myself on Tuesday. I embarrassed myself, too.

My only consolation is that the rabbi is probably the one person I know who really understands Jewish mothers.