This is the first blog post by Harvard freshman, ballet dancer, and SocialGrow summer intern Julie Yen.

Recently, a lawyer friend of mine shared that his firm withdrew a job offer after finding "inappropriate" content on a candidate’s (let’s call him “Bob”) Facebook page.

Social networks provide an incredibly effective way to create and maintain our different personal and professional connections. The challenge, however, is how best to manage social networks' inherent transparency when our historically private, separate communities and activities mix together online.

When Bob started using Facebook in 2004, his parents, professors, and potential employers weren't on Facebook, so he had no reason to think about who could see his content. Bob friended people from all parts of his life, including his aunt, his History professor, and a recruiter he spoke to at his school's career fair. Occasionally he would worry about who could see his posts, but Facebook's privacy settings were confusing and constantly changing. Moreover, not sharing personal content freely made Bob feel cut off from his friends, and his social life trumped the few concerns he had about privacy.

Bob failed to understand the importance of mastering and keeping up with Facebook's privacy settings. Doing so would have enabled him to more effectively balance his personal use of social networks with his increasingly important professional use of them.

Here are my recommendations for controlling your personal and professional online presence, both for my fellow students and for all the other "Bobs" out there who have not yet begun to proactively manage their identities online:

• Use different social media sites to manage the different aspects of your life. You might, for example, decide to keep your Facebook page strictly personal and restrict all of its content to “Friends Only.” You can then use LinkedIn and Twitter to create and share your "public" content for your professional networks and search engines Google and Bing.

• Master Facebook's privacy settings so you can organize and control your connections and your sharing. For example, you might want to pick a default setting for each Facebook sharing category and make “lists” of your friends. You could make lists for family, close friends, college friends, co-workers, and a “restricted” list of people from whom you wish to hide your most personal content. Then, each time you share something, you can customize who sees your content by clicking on the "lock" icon and choosing "Customize”. If you're sharing a video of your uncle at his 50th birthday party that you know his family will love, but that he would not want passed around his office, choose “Specific People” and then type in “Family” to share only with your family list. A few extra seconds is all it takes to control who can access everything you post online.

Yes, keeping track of all of your connections on multiple social networks can be overwhelming. Use tools such as SocialGrow's web application to help you organize and manage your connections. You might realize that you are connected to a close friend on LinkedIn and want to stay in touch with him through Facebook. Or you might see that you’re Facebook friends with your boss, but would rather communicate with her online through LinkedIn and Twitter. SocialGrow makes it easy to invite the people you know to connect with you on your chosen social networks.

While in many cases our personal and professional lives blend together to our benefit -- you might find your next job through your son's soccer coach's husband -- managing your social networks is about purposely controlling who has access to the different kinds of content you post. It's important to take the time to learn, and keep learning, how each site's settings work so *you* can control your personal brand online.


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