Using Facebook to Fire Up Your Career

Sarah Lacy

Did you envision a world where you would become a brand or personality?
I think early in my career it was really obvious that the traditional newspaper world was broken and going away, and if you really wanted to have a career as a journalist that would be sustainable and would continue to be really exciting, you had to get to a point where you were more important to your publisher than they were to you. So for 10 years, I got into places where it was way more important for me to be working for them. But I worked really hard to build enough of a unique perspective to what I was doing and a type of piece that I was very good at writing and really differentiate my skills as a reporter and my skills as a writer and what was different about what I was bringing.

How do you typically communicate online?
Twitter has definitely become way more important to me than almost any other technology. Particularly with the book tour that I'm planning, there's no other way that I could do it than with Twitter. There's no other medium where so many people can immediately get your message and then they can also resend it.

There have certainly been times where my blog was the most important tool, or where Facebook or LinkedIn were the most important tools. I think it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish at that period in time.

Do you draw lines on what you share?
There are obviously things that I don't get into. For instance, my husband does not want to be a public personality. So, I don't write about personal things about him. I just try to be respectful. Our personal life is not lived online.

I think, also, you have to assume that no matter how many privacy features you have, breakdowns can happen so easily because this is just technology and it's not perfect. I think you should never, ever, ever put anything in an E-mail, in a text, in an IM, on a profile page, on Flickr that you wouldn't be OK with the whole world seeing. That is probably the most important thing for people to know.