Blogging & Your Privacy
By Lynette Chandler
Let’s face it. The Internet can be a dangerous place. With so many easy avenues for just about anyone to publicly flaunt or display their personal voices like blogs, it’s also easy for people to be callous about what information is posted.
As entrepreneurs, this can be a problem. People say to make your blog personal, share information, build relationship with your readers but what kind of relationship? Where do you draw the line? On one hand, you want to be approachable and open to your customers. On the other hand, you value your privacy. Ah, the dilemma.
There is no right or wrong answer but there are a lot of things you can do to protect your privacy. While much of it is common sense, sometimes they are easy to overlook during our every day course of business. So let’s review what you can do.
Who’s Blog Is This?
For many entrepreneurs, our business is our life. We are so passionate and immersed in our business that we sometimes forget the business is or should be a separate entity. This is not saying you should be cold and talk business all the time; you should more or less bring some personality into the blog. The point here is, if you take time to step outside of “The business is me” mind set, you’re more likely not to let slip personal details.
Business Information Only
Set limits for yourself what information to share besides the obvious like mailing address and telephone numbers which should be different from your personal one. Consider things like:
What pictures are you willing to put up?
If you’re comfortable with putting out your own picture, it can help build your credibility but what about pictures of you and your family?
Would you share your children’s names and ages?
What information about your spouse or other family members are you willing to put out?
What about your past?
When going on vacation should you post it on your blog? Telling people your offices will be closed should suffice.
Set a sort of agreement with yourself. Generally, it’s a good idea not to discuss your personal life in your business blog. For example, a post about an idea that came to you during Father’s Day barbecue is OK, but if you tell people the barbecue was at Mary’s house who lives out in ABC town and accompany it with a picture, that *may* be a bit too much information. Write just enough to give people a brief background to set your story. Everything else is overkill.
Consider drawing up an employee blogging policy even if you don’t have employees. Think of how you’d advise an employee and apply it to yourself. And when you do have employees, you’ll already have a blogging policy in place.
Review, Review, Review
Because blogging is so easy to do, sometimes we tend to hit the post button too quickly. I’ve been guilty of that. Try to adopt a review-before-publish rule. I sometimes leave my posts overnight so I can see it with a fresh eye the next day.
Review each post to make sure you’re not giving away too much information or information that used collectively with other details you’ve already put forth, could be used against you or jeopardizes your privacy. It would be a good idea to keep a short review checklist you can pull up each time you make a blog post.
Sometimes in blogging you may find a lot of grey areas. The best way I know to deal with what information you should put out is to check yourself each time you post. After a while, you’ll develop a knack of what you can comfortably share and still come across as personable and frank, yet keeps your private life under wraps.
About the Author
Blogger, entrepreneur Lynette Chandler enjoys helping small business owners with their blogs. She authored an e-course to help new bloggers start their blog right from the beginning. Grab yours at Blogging Starter Pack Blog.
Did you enjoy this article? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to our feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment