This is part of a series of short blog posts I wrote for beginners in social media for the Australia Council for the Arts. Enjoy, share and if you have any questions, let me know.

Whenever a new social network or tool is launched and creates enough buzz you can guarantee one thing: there’ll be a swathe of articles about digital security. We’ve seen it just recently with the launch of Google’s new social offering, Google+, but how real are these concerns?

In short? Reasonably. For an arts organisation or company? Extremely real! It’s important to look at this from a couple of different angles:

What you need to know

The most important tip: stop! Don’t put anything into a social network that you would be worried about being known! You can be careful, but the simplest way is to keep it to yourself.

Know your networks! Plenty has been said about Facebook’s security concerns, but there are ways around the confusing security info. The site ReclaimPrivacy.org has a great tool for locking down your settings, for example. Keeping an ear out for new issues is also important.

This post originally appeared as part of the Connecting:// arts audiences online series, and you can continue reading the post on the blog here.