There are good and bad things about Facebook for professionals. For one thing you can tag, friend and interact with prospects, customers, advocates and clients on a regular and very human basis. But the reality is that we’ve got different friends for different contexts and not all of those contexts mesh well with each other.

While many of us have professional friends who share links to articles and useful resources, we’ve also got childhood friends who share the more mortifying content across the web.

Over the past couple of years I’ve become exceedingly transparent about my home life but there are still some friends’ activities I feel uncomfortable with. The more embarassing threads that I’ve seen include offensive jokes, political and religious diatribes, and being unknowingly tagged in association with any of those.



To hold back the tidal wave of unwanted updates, I’ve started creating Facebook lists.

Once you create a list and customize your privacy settings on a line by line basis, it’s pretty easy to decide who gets to access and contribute to particular parts of your profile. Even so, while we can be deliberate about our own posts, Facebook makes it tough to police outsider metadata that auto-associates with your online presence. Few users take it upon themselves to understand privacy controls at a granular level but if you’d like to know how you can protect yourself from being tagged alongside lame jokes and ugly photographs, check out this privacy post from All Facebook. You can also click on the image above to watch their video on some of the things you can do to remove noise.

If you got more tips let me know about them in the comments below.