How to Handle Friend Requests From People Who Are Not Your Friends

The New York Times Jobs section has a great how to article for social networking- with a twist. Instead of showing readers how to max out their online connections and build their personal brand among other professionals, this article shows how to delicately avoid letting work contacts into your personal social networking sphere. Quoting from the page:

Q. A growing number of colleagues have requested to connect with you on social networking Web sites. You have mixed feelings about giving these professional contacts a window into your personal life. What should you do?

A. Proceed with caution. While it may seem harmless to establish virtual connections with your officemates, doing so might put you in an uncomfortable position at work, says Juliette Powell, who runs a career consulting business and wrote a book about social networking, “33 Million People in the Room.”

Social networking is “all about establishing boundaries,” she says. “If you have something online that you wouldn’t share openly with people in the office, you probably want to think twice about inviting them in.”

The article goes on to discuss the threats that mixing business and pleasure online can engender for employees today:

“Any time the camera comes out these days, there’s a chance the resulting photos will be on the Internet within hours,” says Nathan T. Wright, founder of Lava Row, a social media strategy firm in Des Moines. “If you’re going to have work people on these sites, you need to understand this threat.”

Dismissal is even possible if you post something unflattering about your employer in a status update or other feature that can be viewed by everyone on your network.

ReputationDefender Blog has covered the threat that employees face with decreased privacy on social networking sites.

Managing privacy settings is another key to controlling the work/ play boundary on sites like Facebook and MySpace, although consistency is the best practice when dealing with friend requests from the adjoining cubicle.

Q. If you wish to decline certain connection requests, what is the most polite approach?

A. Be honest and consistent. Rachel Weingarten, president of the Octagon Strategy Group, a consulting firm in New York, says employees who wish to avoid colleagues on certain social networking sites should respond to every request by explaining that they’d rather put all work contacts into one particular social network, or designate all social networking sites for connections made outside of work.

These sorts of policies must be applied equally, she says. “The last thing you want is to accept some requests but decline others, then have the people you’ve rejected find out they didn’t make the cut,” she says. In the world of modern office politics, she adds, “that’s about as bad as it gets.”

ReputationDefender encourages individuals to keep privacy concerns in mind when networking online and to educate themselves about how online behavior can lead to real world consequences- both positive and negative.

Tweet This Post