A friend of mine lives in Bozeman, MT. He pointed me to an article that talked about the City of Bozemen requiring job applicants to submit their usernames and passwords for social media sites they are on. You read right. Passwords, too.
When I first heard about this, I had a rather negative emotional reaction to it. I was ready to write about it, but decided to wait and take a step back first. Writing when you’re in the heat of battle is never a good thing.
After a few days, I started thinking why this bothered me so much. Social media is definitely becoming a research vehicle for potential employers. As it should be. How you display yourself out to the public can reflect on the company you work for, good or bad. But there is a distinction between what is available to the entire world vs. what is available to a few friends.
Asking for a password to an account–any account–is akin to asking for the key to your house so they can walk around in it. There is an expectation of privacy behind a password. Allowing access behind that password gives access to parts of your life that a stranger–someone you may never see again–should never see.
Sites like MySpace and Twitter are, by nature, public. What you post there can be seen by the whole world. And as a member of those sites, you need to be cognizant of that at all times. It gets even more so if you are using a screen name that relates to your company like I do on Twitter. You are essentially representing your company whether your tweets are about the company or not.
Sites like Facebook, on the other hand, have privacy controls that let you show what you want to who you want. If you keep your profile restricted from the general public, there is no reason a potential employer needs to see what’s there, because no one but who you give access to will.
Granted, some people are using Facebook like Twitter to gather as many friends as possible. In that case, the Twitter rule applies. But most people have a smattering of in-real-life friends that they befriend on Facebook. Presumably, these people know you. And if you’re going to post pictures of yourself acting like a complete moron, your friends will know it’s you being a moron and not a moron that works for a particular company (not that you should be posting those pictures anyway).
A potential employer asking for a password to a social site is really no different than asking for the password to your email (or the key to your house). They’ll tell you it’s different, but it’s not. Password protected information is, by nature, private. They wouldn’t require a password if it wasn’t.
If an interviewer asks you for that information, I suggest you politely refuse. If they said it’s a requirement for the job, I suggest you politely decline the job. There are other jobs out there (even in today’s economy). If they are going to watch you that closely before you even start working there, imagine how closely they’ll watch you when you are working there.
Every once in a while, when I follow someone, I get a DM asking me to “friend” them on Facebook. I’ve never understood that because Facebook is not the same as Twitter. To me, the paradigm is completely different. Like it or not, having a large number of followers on Twitter is a guage of prestige. Having a large number of friends on Facebook doesn’t have the same level of importance. It’s just not a big deal to have a lot of friends on Facebook.
That got me to thinking about how I use the various social media sites. I definitely have a division of labor between each of the sites. Do you use them the same way I do?
Twitter
If you read my post about Why I Tweet, you’ll know that I think of Twitter as a microblog. I use Twitter to throw out random thoughts to the world to see what sticks. I don’t care who’s reading it or why. I’m expressing my opinion like standing on a soap box in Hyde Park. Anyone who cares to listen, can. And because of that, I try not to get personal too often.
Facebook
Facebook is more for people who know me. I post personal status updates, post family photos (my kid’s birthday party or a recent trip), and have fun taking personality tests that would only really mean anything to someone who knew me. It’s more akin to a (very large) private dinner party than a public soapbox. So if you just met me on Twitter, I’m not going to be your Facebook friend, so don’t ask me.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an ingenious idea. It is (or should be) strictly professional and works on the premise of business networking. You don’t have friends, you have Connections. And your Connections’ Connections are what make up your Network. So if you need someone with a particular set of skills, but don’t know anyone with them, it is a good bet that someone in your network does. And you can use your Connections to contact them. I mainly keep in touch with former colleagues on LinkedIn and what they are up to professionally. I am LinkedIn to a few personal friends, but there, it’s all about business.
MySpace
I don’t get MySpace. I joined because I had to get in touch with someone who wasn’t answering their emails, but I knew was active on MySpace. So I created an account to send them MySpace mail. At the time, I decided to complete my profile to see what the buzz was about. I lost interest quickly.
MySpace, to me, was just a bunch of self-promoting billboards. There was no real interaction. They have status and mood updates now, but it’s still more about you than it is about your relationships. I don’t know if becoming more like Facebook helped them. But by the time they added that functionality, I had already moved on.
Plaxo
Plaxo started out as one giant address book. I really liked the idea because your friends could update their contact information and you could get the update instantly. The problem is, like most address books, that it doesn’t get updated. People forget about it and it’s not better than my paper address book at home.
FriendFeed
I haven’t figured out FriendFeed yet. I don’t really use it because I don’t see how it’s different from Twitter. I’ve been told the signal to noise ratio is better, but most postings there end up on Twitter anyway.
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What bothers me about a lot of these social media sites is that they are all trying to jump on the Facebook bandwagaon. Due to the success of Facebook, all are trying to copy it in some manner or another now with status updates and the like. But they really shouldn’t. Each social media site really has its niche. They should stick with what they started out doing and do it well. People aren’t going to use their site because it does what Facebook does. People use Facebook for Facebook. They aren’t going to jump ship just because the same feature is now on a different site. But they will use sites for something unique that Facebook (or any other social media site for that matter) doesn’t have.
