It is a general misconception that anyone you befriend on FB, can see pictures your high school buddies put up on your FB wall. FB has an extremely impressive privacy setup. You decide who sees what. E.g. pictures from that personal trip years ago could be restricted to your friends, or even your high school friends if you want.

Furthermore, you should separate your profile page (your personal page) from the “so called” fan pages. The fan pages are meant for business purposes, whereas the profile page is for your personal life. If you keep the two separate and change your settings, so that only your high school friends see those embarrassing pictures, you may start enjoying the business FB will bring.

Interesting discussion. Earlier, in my own search for work, I debated similar concerns. Last year I expended a lot of energy cleaning up my contact database. Along the way, I learned quite a bit.

About 15% of my contacts were in LinkedIn. About the same amount, perhaps a shade fewer, were in Facebook. Interestingly, while a third of my contacts were in -either- LinkedIn or Facebook, there was only about a 10% overlap between them. In otherwords, of the roughly 1/3 of my contacts that used social networking, they were fairly cleanly split between the two services.

And, it makes some sense. LinkedIn is the ‘professional’ environment. Expect to find anyone looking to conduct formal ‘business’ there. Don’t dismiss Facebook though. There, I found more casual (as expected) activities, including groups of retailers, non-profits, and -churches-. My church’s youth coordinator doesn’t exist at all on LinkedIn. But she maintains a very dynamic church representation with 100s of her current and past youth members.

Where you spend your time is dependent on where your audiences may be. My recommendation is that you carefully leverage multiple mediums, including Facebook. if your target market is a NPO (non-profit), a service group, or other more-socially minded organization like a religious insititution, you may find Facebook actually more important that LinkedIn.

Of course, there are also exceptions. My motorcycle organization is well represented on Facebook…and i get some active leads via that group. If nothing else, it’s an example where you simply cannot afford to ignore facebook because you see it as a non-business oriented waste of energy. Its rich with business, just the feel or flavor of interaction is different–and you need to be sensitive to it.

Regardless of the forum you elect to use, it really doesn’t matter, what we are all required to do now is -reputation management-. It is a topic I’ve had to discuss with my oldest daughter. When I was her age, my biggest concern was how to get my hands on Dad’s car keys. Now, children to be mindful that what they say today, will be (however minimally) reflective of who they are 20 years from now since nothing ‘goes away’ anymore.