I apologize the Website Wednesday post didn’t make it up until today, but nonetheless here it is.  This Website Wednesday brings you to Mzinga.com, but particularly their blog. I have several friends that work at Mzinga, which is a large web development company that specializes in custom social media. Due to the nature of their work, they are quite current on recent happenings involving social media. Some of their recent posts discuss the privacy of what’s on the Internet. We of course know that the Internet is public, so why wouldn’t the information we put on the Internet be public? Well of course that wouldn’t bode well for online banking, now would it? Many people forget how public the Internet truly is, especially when it comes to social media such as Facebook or Twitter. My personal rule and one mentioned in the last Mzinga post goes something like this, “If you wouldn’t want your mother to see it, then don’t put it online.”

Facebook has been known (by no fault of their own) to cause failed job interviews, robberies and scandals. This of course was not Facebook’s fault, but the individuals who uploaded drunken pictures, publicized when they would be out of town, and various other status updates or posts.

Social media is fun. It was designed to aide in the easy but seldom done art of staying in touch with friends and family. I think it’s awesome there is a community of people willing to share information they come across for the rest of us. I can open an app on my iPhone, find a nearby restaurant, see their menu, how it was rated by actual consumers and even tips of what to order or the best time to get arrive to beat the rush. Awesome. We have all this information at our fingertips but many people don’t see the line between public, “for the greater good” information and personal information.

I urge you to consider what information you put online, my colleagues and I can find a lot of information about you rather quickly depending on what you put online. But by all means please don’t turn away from the Internet out of fear, but rather use it as a tool. In your personal life use it to share with family and friends (real friends, not random people you meet online) what’s happening in your life. In your professional and business life, use it to connect to your customers, promote your business and let everyone searching for your business be able to find it.

Thanks and see you next time,

Matt