About the seminar in NYC http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/spa/researchcenters/nonprofitstrategy/events.php

Although I blog for one of my businesses . . . helping therapists and allied health professionals develop their practices, I, too, am concerned about joining in on the remainder of the social networking opportunities. The reason? Because, the other half of my professional life is as a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice. We are ethically bound to not blur the lines between our personal and professional lives with our (past or present) clients.

Do you understand the dilemma? It may very well be that I can totally control who sees my info . . . . I don’t know about that. I’ve heard other therapists talk about having a social media account (can’t remember if it was Facebook or something else) actually go into their email address books and automatically send invitations to everyone in their database! I can’t have that . . . at all!

Nor can I have my clients just randomly googling my name and my personal info / Facebook accounts coming up (unless of course I’ve formatted them for business purposes only).

I would like to be able to reconnect with individuals from my past for social purposes but I know so little that the risks (real or imagined) keep me from it.

Tamara G. Suttle, M.Ed., LPC
http://www.AllThingsPrivatePractice.com
http://www.TamaraSuttle.com

1. I’ve been stalked before and don’t want to be found easily.
2. Everything online is forever. I like private communications that cannot be accessed by other people. I don’t trust any social media to completely protect my communications which means I have to be willing to risk that anyone can and will see them.
3. A lot of people who are on social media abuse it (IMHO) and post a lot of nonsense. Sorting through all the junk to get to the good stuff is time consuming.
4. I talk to whom I want when I want, so who needs it?
5. A prevalence of written communication diminishes verbal and “in-person” communication, which shoves relationships into a thinner existence.
6. (This one is real for me) Since I am a writer, some of my friends who don’t write hesitate to communicate in writing because they think I will judge them and find them wanting. Despite my insistence that I’d be a pretty lousy friend if I did such a thing, I know they don’t write. So how do I know which of my friends aren’t talking to me because of the form of communication?

With that said, the one piece of insight I’d give my pre-social networking self is to familiarize myself with the privacy settings and wait at least one day between receiving a ‘friend request’ and accepting the request. It’s much more difficult and time consuming to clean up your social networking sites after your college years in preparation for life as a young professional. I still cannot imagine enough hours in the day where I could organize my ‘friends’ into categories with specific settings that could allow me to keep some private life connections and interactions private and separate from my professional contacts. It is a bit much that I know have 4 levels of supervisors ‘friend’ me and ‘follow’ me.