"Social" Media

The "social" component of social media is throwing me for a loop lately. I find myself increasingly torn about how personal and social we really should be when we utilize our social media outlets. Why? Because the line has essentially disappeared between the social world and the professional world. I have friends, colleagues, and professional organizations on both my Facebook friend list and in my Twitter following. Sometimes I want to engage in dialogue professionally -- discuss news, current events or great blog posts -- and sometimes I really don't give a crap. I may have nothing insightful to say and all I really want to comment about is how delicious my morning coffee tastes.

So here's my question. When I tweet about a politics, news, or a PR concept, does it bore my "friend" followers? Or when I update my Facebook status to highlight how excited I am for a martini at happy hour, does it place any question marks about me in the brains of my professional Facebook friends? (Though if you're in PR and you don't engage in networking over a cocktail once in awhile, I'm surprised you're in the field!)

I think that despite our intentions to use these mediums for fun, "social" purposes, they've evolved into a tool for self-branding. After all, if we are all professional all the time, that makes us pretty dry. But if we get too personal and let uncensored opinions fly, we can offend people or become irrelevant.

I opt to use my social media for a mix of business, personal, news and insight, but I still am constantly curious if my status updates, tweets, etc. actually contribute in some beneficial way to the conversations going on via social media. I'm still curious if I'm doing it "right." Does anyone else feel that way?

Then again, if I were to delete all of my accounts in the virtual world and my presence in said world ceased to exist, it really wouldn't affect my real life much; or would it? Perhaps the line between "real" and "virtual" is blurring as well...