Beware The Company You Keep

We all know the words of wisdom that state that you should beware the company you keep. The company you keep is a reflection of yourself because birds of a feather flock together. However, even after you rid yourself of all friends or acquaintances with questionable character, you still have to worry about what others may think about your family. After all, fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, or so they say.

If you thought that this was a hot topic before the rise of the Web 2.0, you must think it’s blazin’ right now.

I recently read a blog post related to this topic. Unfortunately, I can’t find it now and I can’t remember exact details, but I think that the generalities will do just fine.

The girl who wrote this post was a freelancer or contractor, and a client had asked her to build a Facebook fan page. This girl had two Facebook accounts, one for personal use and one for professional use. The client wanted 20 or so people to “like” the site, so she asked her personal Facebook friends to like the page. The client saw the profile picture of one of its fans, was offended by what he saw (I believe it was a picture of a girl getting wasted drunk, but it may have been something sexual), and wanted to know how the girl became a fan of his business. It turns out that the girl with the offensive profile picture was a friend of the girl who built the Facebook fan page. Ouch.

Now, the girl who built the page was in the wrong. She had created two Facebook accounts so that she could deliberately separate her professional and personal contacts, yet when a client wanted 20 or so fans for its own page, she jumped across the boundary she had set up and asked her personal contacts to help with a professional task. She had set up two accounts for a reason; she shouldn’t have forgotten that.

But the more and more I think about this incident, I wonder if the client may have freaked out. After all, you can’t really control who is your “fan”. Maybe you can control which of your fans people can see on Facebook (I’m not sure if you can), but you can’t control who’s talking about you on Facebook or Twitter or on their own blogs.

This is the double-edge sword of online transparency.

The plus side of online transparency is that you know who you’re doing business with. You better know who’s on the other side of the transaction.

The negative side of online transparency is…that you know who you’re doing business with. You better know who’s on the other side of the transaction.

Online transparency may help with weeding out questionable characters when you’re looking for a new employee to represent your company, but it also shows who you’re doing business with.

I think that, if you sell a product or service that may be used by virtually anyone, you may have to accept the fact that you have done business with alcoholics and the promiscuous and people with other characteristics that you may not have favored in the past. If all that you required of others in the past was that they had the means to afford your service or product, why you should start demanding more now? Is that all of a sudden going to change now that we have the means to easily learn more about the average joe than we had before?

Is it realistic to expect people to have a clean slate of friends? We accept this rule about bewaring the company you keep, but then we get offended at the notion of the judgment of others. I’m a dreamer, but I’m not naive enough to believe that others will suddenly stop judging.

The point is, I’m sure that all of us have at LEAST one contact that could turn others off because, after all, you never know what’s going to turn someone off. Profanity, vulgarity, promiscuity, drug use, religious views, political views, what fraternity someone was in — every single one of those topics has the potential to upset someone. And now, thanks to Facebook, every single one of those topics can be shared with the click of a mouse.

If I associated only with people who were just like me and consistently shared my morals and ideals and philosophies, I’d have one friend and one friend only. That’s a damn lonely existence. I always thought that my willingness to overlook certain “flaws” in people and to get along with as many different types of people as possible was a strength. But, if people continue to freak out over little details, I have to second guess how others may perceive the connections I’ve made in the past.

Also, if you don’t have that one friend that others would claim to be ashamed of, chances are that you’re just not aware of it yet. And you’re only one profile picture or status update away from finding out.

While you’re worrying about who your business is associating with now that social media has changed business, so are your competitors. And everyone else. Because they’re just as powerless as you are.

Tagged as: human behavior