Carrie Dunn on making the most of online connections while avoiding the professional hazards of unguarded internet chatter and fake Facebook friends
Anti-social networks?
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SHIRLAINE FORREST/GETTYIMAGES, ASSOCIATED SPORTS PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY
couldn’t help but feel very sorry for Pete Broadbent, the Bishop of Willesden, when his boss took disciplinary action against him for his rather strident views on the tedium of the forthcoming Royal Wedding. Not because of our shared republican feelings, but because he hadn’t vented his rage from the pulpit or in a newspaper column; instead, he’d had a bit of a rant on Facebook. I can’t count the number of friends I’ve reconnected with, or the case studies I’ve found, or the PRs I’ve chatted to, or the interviews I’ve set up thanks to Facebook and Twitter. But when you’re using the networks to make contacts and communicate, can it create false intimacy? Does being accountable and open to dialogue also leave you open and vulnerable to personally-directed attacks? Well, yes, it can. It’s important to remember that the people who are your ‘friends’ on there are, more often than not, actually not your friends. They’re people on the internet with whom you get on OK. Or who find your updates interesting. Or who work in a tangentially related field to yours and want to use social networking for professional networking. All of which is fine, of course, until it comes to situations
when you say something they don’t agree with, or that shocks them, or that they weren’t expecting. Your friends will tend to let you off – they’ll either agree with you on a lot of things or they’ll already know your views on contentious topics, and they won’t be surprised. Your online followers will be appalled – and they won’t be appalled in a silent way; they’ll lure you into a never-ending debate in which they try to point out to you exactly why you’re wrong. I know this from bitter experience. As UK editor of international theatre website BroadwayWorld, I reviewed a show a while ago, knowing that the director and the producer were people who had ‘friended’ me on Facebook for professional networking purposes, but whom I’d never met. I wasn’t very keen on the production and wrote a negative review, but acknowledging that some of my problems with the show were matters of personal opinion and taste. I wasn’t surprised that they weren’t happy about my review. I was rather more surprised – perhaps naively – that they then both opted to bombard me with angry direct messages on Facebook, a means of communication they wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t accepted their friend requests. It became evident that, as their ‘friend’, they had expected me to provide a rather more ‘friendly’ review, and felt personally let down and betrayed. On another embarrassingly memorable occasion, I used my Facebook status to unleash my fury at a sub-editor removing one of my favourite lines from some copy I filed – forgetting that one of his colleagues was a ‘friend’ of mine. I got a rather stiff email about 20 minutes later from the sub-editor in question asking me to contact him directly in future if I had problems with the way my copy had been presented.
WOOPS, DID I SAY THAT... Cricketer Kevin Pietersen found himself trouble last summer when he accidentally sent a public tweet rather than a text to a friend, raging about being dropped from England’s oneday squad. He deleted it within 20 seconds but it had already been read by thousands of his followers. The Right Reverend Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden,
commented on his Facebook status that the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton would be engulfed by ‘nauseating tosh’ and that the marriage would last seven
years. He was subsequently withdrawn from public ministry.
CNN Middle East editor Octavia Nasr lost her job last year
Comedian Jason Manford left his
after commenting on Twitter that she ‘respected’ the late Muslim cleric Ayatollah Fadlallah.
job as presenter of the BBC’s The One Show in November 2010 following stories that he sent sexually explicit tweets to a female fan.
A Royal Bank of Scotland worker
lost her job in November last year after bragging about her redundancy package offer on Facebook.
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