Lately I have been asked a question several times regarding our
use of Facebook so I thought it would be good to share my thoughts with all of
you.
As a business that has a primary goal of taking care of your
cherished furkids, ensuring our clients confidentiality and security causes us
to be very careful with our use of all social networking tools. Quite frankly Facebook is one tool that is
very difficult to control fully so it gives us particular challenges,
especially with sharing photos. I have
chosen not to have an open business page for several reasons. Our Facebook presence, as you may know, is
not a "New Orleans Pet Care" group page that can be
"liked". It is "Nicole Douget" and I am very careful
in accepting friend requests. With very few exceptions, unless you are a client
involved in non-profit or rescue organizations or someone that I know very well
I don't accept friend requests from outsiders. Sounds a
bit snobby but I have reasons. We take our
confidentially policy very seriously. Once you "friend" us or accept
our "friendship request" we feel like you are open to being seen as a
friend. But in reality we must still be very careful on what we share because
even with tight privacy settings things can be shared on Facebook in a way that
is unique and is often dependent on the privacy settings of our friends. Settings we have absolutely no control
over.
With that in mind our clients can include both traveling clients
and clients that use us on a daily basis while working, etc. Not all of
our clients share every moment on Facebook and we want to be respectful about
that by not posting photos of pets while they are away. Frankly, it is a security issue for the
"Facebook world" or anyone to know they are gone. Very rarely,
we share some photos when I am CONFIDANT that it will not be an issue but I regularly
delete items from our photos and I do not tag us or anyone on those photos.
We will not ever risk our client’s privacy or safety for any reason.
The blog is a totally different matter but we still take every
effort to insure privacy. If you notice, we do not post names of pets and
avoid posting photos of the exterior of our client homes. We also post
different things in different places. For example, a client who is
a Facebook friend and a business owner (in this
industry) just opened a business and posted about it. Another client who
is also a Facebook friend owns a company that makes products
that are related to this industry too commented on it. We shared her post
on Facebook but not on the blog because I did not have
permission to do so.
We like to use Facebook and Twitter as platforms for rescue,
events, information, and goofy things we see around NOLA and the occasional
Nicole rant! Could that change in the future? Sure, but not without
careful thought and planning and with client privacy and safety driving our
use. Facebook has made great strides in adding additional levels of security
and privacy but until we are 100% confident we can maintain full
confidentiality of our clients I will continue my carefully thought out
practices.
So... If you ever wondered why - that is the long story... long.
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