Should you keep two profiles for work and personal use?

Should one maintain separate profiles and accounts for work and for personal use? Life once was simple. One maintained a persona at work for the well pressed, talented career minded and another for the home. The work life and the home life were to co-exist but never to crisscross except perhaps at the annual corporate picnic. This was the way things were "supposed to be." Of course the reality was never so neat and tidy but these were seemingly the ideals of a previous generation. Without social media would this same mentality have lived on or would it have gone the way of the poodle skirt? Then along came social media transforming the workplace. Our greatest inventions bought us into the 21st century making everything faster and more connected. Not just connected, interconnected. This great promise of connections brings up as many questions as it does answers, opportunities as challenges. Before we answer the question whether to maintain two separate profiles we have to answer the question of why we connect. In the most extreme example I've turned on Dr. Phil and heard people defending the openness of what I'd consider a horror show of young men and women just old enough to vote passed out in states of undress hugging toilets with their photos posted on Facebook. These photos may make them popular at school but will those photos of a rather personal nature haunt their careers forever? I think we can use this most extreme of examples to say that it should be common sense that making a fool of yourself is never work-appropriate. Once we answer the question of why we connect then we can answer the question of whether to maintain one or two profiles. However not only is there no right answer to this question but the answer may be as deeply personal and individual as its ramifications are public and reverberate across the far corners of the Internet. It will always come down to one's personality, life view and therefore sense of personal privacy and how you are using that account. Different sites each with their own quirks raise questions of privacy and sharing. Different sites each with their own unique cultures can elicit entirely different choices from us of what we wish to share there adding to the culture and experience of the site. Who would have thought anyone would be comfortable using their real names in cyberspace instead of a pseudonym? That was actually one of the most incredible things about Facebook. People were who they really were. With such openness in mind Facebook was really designed initially to merely connect with people you already knew whereas Twitter was meant to be a more open exchange and opportunity to meet new people. I am a fan of just keeping one profile. This grows out of my philosophy that I care for all of my clients as if they were good friends. I am not threatened by connecting to other agents because I feel we have much to gain from one another and that everyone in my life will either be attracted to the authentic me or it wouldn't have been a good match anyway. Robin Greenbaum and Michael Lorber are the founders of Cobroke Nation (www.cobrokenation.com), New York, N.Y.