Just about everyone is on Facebook.  Most professionals are on LinkedIn.  And a totally confused group of people in between have Twitter accounts that they do not use.

Things I've heard in the past two weeks:

• What is Twitter?
• Twitter is stupid.
• LinkedIn is being replaced by Facebook.
• Twitter is replacing Facebook.
• Facebook has replaced Twitter.
• My Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts are all linked.
• Businesses need to leverage Facebook.

All true.  And all false.  None of it matters.

Most fraternities have a mixture of elected and appointed positions: officers, chairmen, executives, etc.  The chapter I advise certainly does.  Over the years, a number of plans have been proposed for electing vs. appointing this position or adding new positions or giving a particular position a number of assistants.  I would venture that none of these plans have ever made the chapter much more effective at doing anything in particular.  I had a thought a while back: what if you integrated the idea of T-Groups with chapter organization?

I am a student at, arguably, the finest graduate degree program in all the world: Organization Development & Knowledge Management at George Mason University.  Twice a semester, we have a class called a Learning Community in which a group from the program organizes a day of workshops, experiential learning activities, seminars, and other fun for the entire program, the faculty, and alumni.  The most recent one was run with an Open Space Technology format.  This basically translates into: the attendees put the day together themselves.  On what began as somewhat of a dare, a classmate and I offered to teach a one hour workshop on meditation and spirituality in the workplace.  We watched with increasing horror as dozens of people signed up to take our course.  And we had five minutes to plan it.

Everyone is on Facebook.  Everyone.  But everyone doesn't really want everyone else to see everything.

Most commonly, people want their close friends to see their walls, photos, and general pointless updates.  These same people do not necessarily want to share their lives with their bosses, classmates, or people they weren't really that close with in tenth grade to begin with - let alone fifteen years after high school.

There are really two things you need to work with:

1. Friend Lists
2. Privacy Settings

Start with the Friend Lists because it takes longer:

1. Click the Friends link on the top left of Facebook.
2. Click the Create New List button.
3. Name this list whatever you want.  You can have any combination of "co-workers" and "old classmates" and so on - but I recommend just making lists based on how much of your life you want to share (Close Friends, Okay Friends, etc.).
4. You can select all the members right away or any time in the future.  Also, when you receive new friend requests, you can add people to these groups at that time.

Now, by themselves, these lists are not that useful.  That's where the Privacy Settings come in:

1. Click Settings > Privacy Settings on the top right of Facebook.
2. Click Profile.
3. Select a drop-down and click Custom.
4. Under Friends, select the Some Friends radio button.
5. Type in the name of your chosen friend list and select it.
6. Under Networks, select the None of my Networks option.
7. Click the Okay button.
8. Click the Save Changes button.

These settings allow you to get pretty fine-grained e.g., "everyone can see my wall except Wallace from HR." 

There's also a little-used feature at the top of the Privacy Settings page that allows you to type in any friend's name and you see your profile as he or she sees it.