I Was Just Exposed on Facebook

Peter Preksto is a co-founder of image-recognition company Alta Data Solutions, Inc.

My business is pretty esoteric–we scrape petrified information off of paper or microfiche at super high speed and make it machine readable, useful for lawsuits and electronic benefits claims, among other things. Our customers are a relatively small number of service bureaus that process billions of such documents per year. I hadn’t thought of my use of social media as a marketing tool because we’re not really expecting to grow through word of mouth but by providing more functionality and speed at a lower cost to those who care about such things. My peers are in their 50’s and 60’s. Most of us started on mainframes, helped invent document-processing technology on intervening platforms, and have ended up in the cloud. In 1983, we first started inter-office chatting to each other using a utility in Novell Netware, and we mostly haven’t shut up online since. Twitter ultimately didn’t pass muster except as a novelty, but Facebook was a natural adoption. We tend to clamp our privacy down perhaps more than our younger colleagues, but we’re using and like the service a lot.

I’ve long believed that you cannot conceal who you really are if you use Facebook regularly–people can really get your number by looking through your books, music, quotations, links, videos, smart-ass remarks, notes of sympathy, whatever. In this big country, you stay closer to friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and folks who you might otherwise have let drift (and a few who have come drifting back against the tide). If you work it, you stand exposed.

A couple days ago, I was friended by a really important business colleague, president of one of the big service bureaus whom we serve. While we don’t need to network to grow, if you screw up in our small community, it has a big impact. He joked on the phone about my Facebook content, saying it was really “out there,” lots of “personality,” very “young at heart.” I froze. At that moment, I realized the double-edge sword of Facebook. Even if you practice a policy of avoiding writing about politics, religion, creationism, diet, immunization and handguns (and boy don’t we all have opinions we’d love to share on those!), you still stand exposed–in a way even Rotary didn’t do to you in the old style of networking.

I seriously considered un-friending all of my business colleagues and leaving it strictly social and family. Fortunately, I probed the guy a few days later, joked about his comments, and found out that I had it backwards–what he saw, he liked, and it brought us closer together–Facebook shortened the learning curve he would have climbed to learn who he’s dealing with.

A life on Facebook is no place to hide. So maybe letting whoever the heck it is that you’ve turned out to be shine through that medium might be good for business–even if you’re not using it exactly as the pros would suggest for viral growth.

Speaking of pros, many thanks and much respect to Kyle Lacy and Brandon Coon for the company they’re building, and thanks for sharing so generously their insights and experience in their blogs.

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