Split personality

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a really interesting talk by Lindsay Clandfield at the Society of Authors about social networking for writers. A lot of what Lindsay was speaking about I was already doing to a greater or lesser extent, with this blog and with Twitter, generally keeping in touch with what's going on in ELT and keeping others up-to-date with what I'm doing. One area of the whole social networking sphere that I've been struggling with though is Facebook. 

Although I've been using Facebook for several years, it's primarily been a social space to keep in touch with friends. Recently, work has started to creep in, mostly in the form of work-related pages that I follow, such as White Ink, a great forum for ELT freelancers. I've also started accepting friend requests from people who are really more colleagues than part of my social circle. I was a little bit wary at first about mixing work and personal stuff, but as most of my posts are fairly uncontroversial - the odd moan about the weather and updates about my garden - it didn't seem much different to the kind of things I might chat about to colleagues if I worked in an office.What I've steered clear of so far though is posting about work-related things. My "real friends" probably don't want to hear about a rather specialist talk I'm about to give or some new EAP forum I've come across. 

Lindsay's solution to using Facebook for work was to remove all the personal content from his profile. It was an avenue I didn't really want to go down, because I do find it such a great medium for keeping in touch with pals around the world and I didn't want to lose that. So instead, I decided to split my personal and my work Facebook personas and I set up a new page, Jules' Words, as a space for everything work-related so I can keep my personal profile, well, personal. I'm not quite sure yet how it's all going to work, but I guess as with all these new forms of media, I'll just pick it up as I go along.