Social media is the latest thing that most of us are hooked onto. The networks created on social media start out with personal contacts and then spread over to professional and extended friend circles. The catch is that everybody in the network is able to see what you post. And, many a time, employees in IT fail to distinguish between confidential information that has restricted control within company networks and this information can get propagated into personal and friends' circles, thereby causing a potential threat to the company.

Not only this, when social media is mixed between professional and personal contacts, professional contacts are able to see your personal antics, which can potentially reflect badly on the organization you work with.

What happens in the office stays in the office. Do not write about it elsewhere, especially on channels that are over the Internet. You must never share about what is happening in your office to the outside world. For example, "Delayed at work. Working on a proposal for Company A" read one of the updates from an employee of a competitor's organization. Our organization did not know that the client company was looking for certain services, which we incidentally offered too. We immediately contacted the client company to throw our hat in the race too. A naive mistake made by the employee cost the company an illustrious contract.

Keep professional and personal contacts on different networks preferably to avoid embarrassing situations for yourself and for your employer. Your customer need not know that you had too much to drink last night and imagine if there is an early morning meeting scheduled with them. Forget customers, if you have your boss on your network, your boss will know what you do when you take off, and this could perhaps reflect badly on the relationship between the two of you. The best way to deal with this, as I mentioned earlier, is to maintain separate networks and don't mix the two. It's like drinking. You must never mix different types of drinks in the same session.

Google Plus allows you to maintain various circles, which can be particularly useful in keeping distinct networks and posting specific updates to networks of your choice. Or, keep all your professional contacts on LinkedIn and personal ones on Facebook to avoid crisscrossing updates between various groups of contacts.