Your Facebook Profile Pic Makes You Look Bad

At work today, I got a call from a coworker wondering who ran our company's Facebook page. She was concerned by one of our Facebook "fans" whose profile picture apparently was a scantily-clad Playboy model. My coworker thought we should kick out the fan for his potentially offensive profile picture.

The fan in question is not an employee of my company. If he were an employee, I could call him and let him know that the company is at this moment developing guidelines for how employees behave on social media sites – even when on their own time. He could take that under advisement and either change his profile pic or go to work for a hipper industry.

Frankly, I'm not sure why a young man with, shall we say, more artistic aspirations, would want to become a Facebook fan of an engineering company. But he is. And that is just how the web works.

I spoke with our social media administrator, and we agreed that the best course of action was no action, but the situation reminded me of a phone interview I had with professional speaker and coach, Jane Atkinson. I was talking to her about personal branding, and how a person's brand influenced their professional opportunities. The conversation turned to channels (like Facebook and LinkedIn) for marketing the "self brand". She navigated to my Facebook page as we spoke, and she saw my profile pic – a photo of a statue of three deer in a, shall we say, artistic pose.

I was deeply embarrassed. The personal brand article turned out great, but I instantly became aware of how my credibility was jeopardized by my admittedly juvenile sense of humor.

My internal debate has been that desire to live an unfettered life versus finding new opportunities, personally and professionally. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt said it best with "with great freedom comes great responsibility" – or am I thinking of Ozzy Osbourne who wrote "I don't want to change the world/I don't want the world to change me"?

It's a new world, I guess. Love it or leave it.

Not BFFs Anymore?

Can this relationship (with Social Media) be saved?
I know I’m getting up there in years, pushing 40, so you crazy kids, with your hippity-hop music and your IMs and texting-while-driving are way ahead of me on the e-communication front, so you probably won’t get this: but I’m thinking about pulling the plug on personal email.

After a week without even thinking about my Yahoo! email, I finally checked in to see 200+ messages.

I clicked “Check All” for several screens, and then “Delete”, and I probably won’t think of it again for another week.

I don’t even remember my Gmail password, so don’t bother emailing me there.

I used to check my personal email several times every day, waiting for something interesting to turn up, as if I were a lonely puppy waiting for my owners to come home and feed me.

But now, not so much.

And I’m not the only one. According to a six-year analysis of internet activity by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). That study concluded that people are spending less time emailing in 2009 than in 2003. Overall, the study found that people are using the internet about seven hours more each month than in 2003, but they are emailing 41% less as a total share of their internet usage.

Consider the ol’ email marketing campaign kaput.

Sure, you blanket more user accounts now more than ever, but people are not opening those emails. We’re just not that into email anymore - except our work emails, of course. (Who said work was supposed to be sexy?)

And then along came MySpace and Facebook. Hot, hot, hot.

Social media sites now get used as much as internet shopping, no doubt in part because sites like Facebook have their own “email” and communications built right in. They have an “import contacts” feature that moves everyone in my dumpy old email address book right into their nubile system.

What would I need another email site for? If I absolutely need to contact someone out of social media network, I can just email them from my work account or *gasp* call them.

In Facebook, however, I’m rapidly losing interest in my friends’ “Mafia Wars” updates and “hug requests”. Maybe it’s because Facebook reveals what a frenetic and frivolous timewaster I am.

The lonely puppy is losing interest again.

But if I break up with Facebook, what will fill those 3 hours a month that the OPA study says I average on social media?

If only Linkedin had more apps…