This video is getting a lot of buzz and I think it’s certainly worth a look. It’s basically a cool take on how so much of our lives are lived on Facebook – and that’s just for your average Joe, not even a social media chick like myself that does this social media stuff for a living.

People blog and talk a lot about professional and personal balance in social media, and in conferences they stand up and say to “just get over it.” They’re right, at some point we have to just get over it. Google knows no difference. Your personal and professional accounts, opinions and profiles are this big hot mess of an online presence. If you aren’t comfortable with mixing that, you probably aren’t in the right business.

That said, I just want to put it out there that it’s still hard.

It’s hard because people my age haven’t only used social media for business use. We joined Facebook before we left for college, to meet our roommates and classmates online before we moved in freshman year. We joined before “grown ups” were on there, before there were fan pages to manage and before FBML was invented. We put dumb stuff up there sometimes because we didn’t know better. Facebook was an epicenter and broadcast portal for drama. And for some, with jobs that don’t matter so much what your “personal brand” and “online presence” is – it still is.

Now I’m using Facebook as a marketing tool, and it’s a weird conflict. I login to update my business’ fan page or create an event for a Tweetup or network with other community managers in the community managers group, and “on my way to work,” I’m bombarded by a parade of other people’s life choices, aka the news feed, leaving me feeling distracted and confused. All I wanted to do was plan a damn Tweetup and move on to the next task for the day. Now I’m questioning my path to personal success!

I don’t think that having separate personal and professional Facebook is the answer. Having two separate accounts would almost further distance the professional/personal sides and intensify the identity crisis, I think. Plus, in my case, it’s probably too late for that. It probably comes down to having more self-assurance and comparing myself less to people I don’t know anymore, filtering them out of my news feed even.

Anyone else struggle with this, even if we’re not supposed to admit that we struggle with this?