Do you list your LinkedIn or Twitter contact info on your business card or email signature line?

People invest a significant amount of time using social media. As more of that time becomes intertwined with a person’s professional life, it is a natural impulse to promote that presence on tools like business cards or email signature lines.

Just as poor advertising fails to convert impressions into sales, though, blindly promoting your social media presence may serve little, if any, constructive purpose.

photo credit: smi23le

What Is Your Objective By Featuring These Networks?

The crux of the matter is this: why are you highlighting LinkedIn or Twitter (or any other social media network) in the first place? What do you hope to gain from the exposure?

Are you highlighting your presence to declare you’re hip to the trend?

Do you want to expand your network?

What Value Will Featuring These Networks Bring Your Company?

When you promote a social media network from your business persona, you must take into consideration how your persona will impact your company’s brand. This is especially true if you use Twitter for non-business related conversations (i.e., sports, religion or politics come to mind).

What impression would you take away from someone whose Twitter Timeline only espoused disdain for certain politicians or why your favorite sports team needs to sack its coaching staff?

On the other hand, since LinkedIn is a social network for professionals, you can make a great argument for including it on business cards and email signature lines. But if LinkedIn is an arrow in your job search quiver, it has no place on your company’s cards or email signature.

What Do I Do Personally?

I don’t include either LinkedIn or Twitter on my business card. I have my phone number, email address and Skype profile name. These are the three best ways to contact me. For my email signature, I include my company name, business address, direct line, cell phone, and Skype profile name.

When I meet someone new, I ask them if they use LinkedIn. If they do, I send them an invitation to connect with me.

photo credit: Sh4rp_i

Bruce Nussbaum (LinkedIn, Twitter), a professor at the Parsons School of Design, points out that Facebook inflicted serious damage to its brand identity when HR professionals began scouring Facebook for background on prospects.

My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers.

Nussbaum says Facebook is breaking three cardinal cultural norms:

1. It is taking back a free gift. In order to build profits, Facebook has been commercializing and monetizing friendship networks. What Facebook gave to Millenials, it is now trying to take away. Millennials are resisting the invasion to their privacy.
2. Facebook is ignoring the aging of the Millennials and the subsequent change in their culture. Older Gen Yers want less sociability and more privacy as actors outside their trusted cohort enter the Facebook space in search of information and connection. These older Millennials want more privacy tools for control of their information and networks.
3. Facebook is behaving as though it owned not only its proprietary technology platform but the friendship networks created on it. It doesn’t. Millennials believe that ownership of their networks of friends belongs to them, not Facebook, and resist their commercialization.

You can read his entire essay on the Harvard Business Review.

How Many Will Quit?

One study claims that 60-percent of Facebook users will quit over privacy. With more than 400-million users, that could be close to 240-million users (or, if nationalized, a population slightly smaller than Indonesia). However, there is a vast expanse between mulling a decision to leave and actually pulling the trigger and deleting an active account.

My personal estimate is that Facebook will lose between 1-3 percent next week. Facebook could delete inactive users (users who have not user the service for more than 18 months) and make a bigger dent in the number of accounts than what Quit Facebook Day hopes to accomplish.

None-the-less, Quit Facebook Day has succeeded in raising concerns over privacy and Facebook. Rather than take the hit to their reputation, Facebook has responded.

Do you plan to quit Facebook on Monday? Leave a comment below and explain why or why not.