Social Media Hurting Your Career?

27 August 2009 in Networking by Tyler | Comments

I recently read an article bringing up the ways that social media can hurt your career. We have all seen these articles that highlight the horror stories of Joe who called in sick and his boss read his tweet about going to the Red Sox game, who subsequently fired him, or whatever.

While I think the three social networking don’ts highlighted should be considered, I still fail to see the fault in social networking regarding career advancement. While sometimes the incriminating tweets and status updates are funny to read, most people who have a handle on social networking platforms and how they work know the potential, good and bad, of anything you post reaching new readership.

My rule of thumb used to be: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your dear old Grandma to hear. Now that my social media usage has changed from strictly personal socialization to more utilitarian applications, including career advancement, my rule of thumb is: don’t post anything you that wouldn’t feel comfortable saying directly in person.

As long as you remember that it may seem like a post in outer-space, anyone can stumble upon anything. There are also different ways of saying similar things and you can still express your opinions in an inoffensive way. It’s about applying the simple rules of gossip that we learned in elementary school to this version of tech gossip…also, not everything thought needs to be said.