Personal vs. Professional (Online) Identity... Can they remain separate?

This week the prof will be hosting a FB chat on the above theme. She posted some questions to get our juice thoughts flowing.

Personal vs. Professional Identity
Looking at conflation of the personal with the professional while participating on social media:
-- What are we learning about one another?
-- How does this effect our interactions?
-- How does social media affect our learning as a group?
-- What value do you see with using social media professionally?

We've read several articles which say that there is no way to completely separate the two. And considering how things may be indexed, linked, quoted, uploaded, etc without a person's explicit participation or permission, I can see how this is technically true. Doesn't mean that I won't try my damnedest to maintain a separation such as using Facebook solely for friends and family (and editing the privacy permissions in my profile), while building a professional network on Twitter and LinkedIn.

I think the question I want to focus on is the third one. This week we read an article called "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted" by Malcolm Gladwell and published by The New Yorker Oct 4, 2010. While the gist of the article argues against the ability of social media to drive revolutions, one of the supporting points is that social media supports/drives weak connections. You are connected to people you don't know personally (think your Twitter followers/followees) or with whom you don't share a strong tie (such as long lost friends you want to re-connect with). He points out that those very weak ties are the ones we most benefit from in terms of learning new ideas and getting connected to the people we need to know to advance in the world.

So my classmates and I are weakly connected. We share the same school and class, but we live away from each other (different states), and we have no motivation outside of completing our coursework to interact with each other using the online tools. But, this group will probably be my most informationally influential group because more eyes will be able to read the vast quantity of content, filter out the relevant or interesting ones and drive them to me. I can tell you this, I love to see what my mom is doing, but her posts will not advance my career (though they may help my household).