Line in the Sand, Inc.

Does a line between the professional and the personal still exist?

LinkedIn seems to have been created for the express purpose of providing a professional social network. This network would provide an opportunity 4 geographically disparate professionals to connect, do business, find new employees or employers, ETC.

LinkedIn has increasingly become as much of a social media platform as any other with respect to the airing of personal opinion, bias, and personal information.

The question of whether or not this shift is good, or proper, is an opinion question and therefore up to each individual to decide. What is of more interest is whether or not our professional lives and personal lives have any sort of dividing line as they once did.

That time once existed, for some of us. We would never dream of airing religious, professional, or controversial personal opinions in a public forum that included our professional colleagues and communities. It was simply anathema to the idea of being professional to share these personal beliefs.

57.2% of LinkedIn users are male, and 59% of users are between 25-34 years of age.        

Whether or not this attitude was created by a social taboo, the society in which we were raised, or our own upbringing, a look at LinkedIn reveals as many personally oriented postings as there are professional postings.

Is this a bad thing?

Would you purposefully avoid doing business with someone who had voted for President Trump? Would you purposefully seek out business partners and vendors who profess a strong faith in public? What about the negative side of these questions... Would you refuse to do business with an atheist? What about someone who was pro choice, or whose political beliefs were diametrically opposed to your own?

If you choose to make these pipes of beliefs public on LinkedIn or elsewhere, are you concerned that the result of your decision might be lost business opportunities?

We do live in an interconnected world; perhaps you believe that your feelings and beliefs are easy to find on other platforms, so airing them on LinkedIn does nothing more then creating another location to learn about you.

There is no right or wrong answer, as each of us makes our own decision about how much of our own personal world we reveal. If you believe LinkedIn is and inappropriate home for these sorts of posts, then your options include deletion, blocking the poster, or requesting the poster keep those types of comments to personal locations such as Facebook. If you choose to post such personal things, then you are choosing to share values about which you feel strongly enough that you do not worry about professional consequences (if indeed any were to occur).

Whatever dividing line once existed between personal and professional has certainly been blurred and may very well no longer exist. If this dividing line has vanished, then are we fated to see LinkedIn become the “ adult playground” version of Facebook?

Will LinkedIn become a place where business is won and lost on things outside of the scope of products and services?