None, for the regular employee. But if it is the personal life of a celebrity exec, a CEO covered in the press, then it could definitely have an effect on the company's reputation. And this is not only for ill, but also for good. The existence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation puts Microsoft in a better light.

An employee's personal life has everything to do with the companies reputation, because as a staff of that company, the employee is an ambassador of the company outside.Whatever he or she does people will mistake it to be the norm of his work place.Let me site an example with my former place of work.You get to find out that most of the staffs womanizes, most times when u hear people talk, instead of picking up on the individaul as an entity, they say 'that is how they behave, all of them behave like that' while in the real sense is not true.There are lots of men in that company who detest that behavior, but the bad reputation of the hand full who has that the has robbed off on the innocent once around.
Regards
Eromona Patrick Hero Ogaga

I agree - it will be to difficult to start generating revenue now. But I like Milden's point: "Imagine how useful it could of been during September 11th." For that reason alone, Twitter may be more useful as a non-monetized agent.

As a small contracting company(<100) in a small community (<500,000) our hiring practices deliberately and necessarily reflect the significant impact that personal reputations carry into the places of business.

Our corporate community has recently had an unfortunate incident where a fellow contractor had a high-profile employee arrested for a rather heinous crime committed away from (and unrelated to) the workplace. Fair or otherwise, this intrusion of personal action into the professional environment had an impact on the level of the employer's credibility with respect to personal judgement. Although the company will recover from this event, their name no longer invokes 'pillar of the community' as a first reaction but rather 'isn't that the company that...'

I can theorize that the impact would be affected in inverse proportion to the sizes of the community and the company; in our community the hiring of disreputable members is done at one's own risk.

I think it depends on what he or she does in their personal life, and how many people know about it. Can it potentially matter? Yes. Should it matter? I think it depends on a number of factors. My biggest concern would be matters of integrity.

aq lot . if your employee is happy .the customer can tell and it puts them at ease and puts them and the employee at ease.

Ideally, and in a normal world; an employee's personal life should be just that. His/her own business. Interpersonal relations should be secondary to working goals. INOW, we go to work - to work, not to socialize or be entertained by co-workers.

Unfortunately, our world in 2008 is a crazy one. Domestic violence is up and so is "acting-out" behavior. I am thinking about the impact a co-worker, whom I was friendly with; had on her work place.

JaneDoe was a very attractive young woman. A classic blue-eyed blond w/a figure to die for. JaneDoe had good work habits; she did very good and accurate work on whatever tasks were assigned to her. She was polite, prompt, and very focused on her work. She seemed to be a rather quiet and shy person; unless she got to know a person. She was very sweet and never nasty to co-workers or managers.

Unfortunately, JaneDoe had a bizarre personal life which included her attraction to dangerous men with whom she encouraged very inter-dependent relations. She loved the concept of a "house husband". Once she got hooked up w/a boyfriend (she had 3 during my 10 yrs working w/her) -- that man would somehow loose his job and become very dependent on JaneDoe. She seemed to have masochistic tendancies; she had to take time off to see doctors for injuries related to domestic violence. One partner tried to break her ear drum by throwing an object at her face; on another occasion she had a broken arm; and she did become pregnant while abusing drugs & liquer. She lost one baby due to miscarriage as a result of a fight. She took off personal leave for one pregnancy, which was high risk because of her drinking and getting beatin up on regular basis, even when pregnant.

One day, an angry boyfriend followed her to work and the two started to fight violently in the public halls of her work site. Her boyfriend threatned to hurt any co-worker who would try to stop or defuse him. It was very scary, especially since, in that city, there had been a recent murder commited at a city hall office, when a dangerous boyfriend stalked his lover who worked there.

This is an example of how a person's lifestyle can drag other people down and contaminate a work site. Bad primary relationships also create stress that cause an employee to lose focus on their work, margine of human error gets higher.

The closer you go to the top (i.e. highly visible roles like 'C-levels', the Board itself, arguably anyone with VP in their title, etc.), the more impact a personal life has.
Personal lives (at the top levels of an organization) move the needle of outstanding shares, as people buy and sell on news . . . meaning there can often be a direct correlation between stock price and negative (or positive) PR.
Another way to look at this is to consider that the financial markets are nothing more than a competition for capital, so investors look for reasons to buy your stock over another firms (considering the projected returns are similar); therefore, if your top levels are linked to Green initiatives or the reduction of CO2 emissions, etc., it's a competitive advantage ("tie-breaker") as investors emotionally feel that they're doing something good for the world.

We push the concept of BRAND YOU out there and then we ask this kind of question? I have to construct a superficial and defensive bridge between work and life so it can satisfy a world out there that is stuck deep in the well of constant Freudian machinations. A world which views life not as a form of perfection or as a gift to draw blessings from, not as a strength that makes life joyful, but as a harmful disease, that is watched through the lens of observing the worst of human life than the best. We are talking impact here and the impact is not something that sits outside of our own given selves, we are that impact, we are complicit in driving that impact, we have spent most our working lives living in side hospices of unfitness, rather than taking a modicum of our time and notice the stuff that works! How innate do we make our very own existence by focusing seemingly perpetually on what doesn't work, while blithely dismissing most of the things that do work. How did we end up producing this kind of impact crater when the finger we point should be pointing directly back at our own selves and not as one more cameo of media focus. Why does reading such a question instantly provide us personal immunity to the very contributions we have our own selves added to furthering this dimension of being bequeathed an armor of our nervous system reputation. I take all of this meaning (which is not the birthright of this century) and would love to flush it away in the nearest washroom, but I can't because we have all given a name to it, and that name is one that we call ABJECT REALITY. I don't know at present what my personal answers to this predicament is for that is what I am trying to fathom out here and I am prepared to take a full nine months to answer it; but I sure know that the answer does not exist in more branding, or more reputation systems, or figuring out the safest way to navigate around the "disease", when we spent time far little time in comparison meditating on the far more critical question WHAT IS HEALTHY?. And then our response to our focus on the pits of life is to separate life from work - wow! how many more surgical procedures do we need before we realize that the focus of most of our thinking time is expended on the wrong questions (for they are short-term and siloed in nature) when the right questions are all those ones that we willfully procrastinate on - because it is so much easier to be witch-doctors to the world, rather than indulge in the creation of our own fitness; and therefore recognize the true nature of our own inner reputation. If the world thereafter still remains the same, IMHO I say accept it but at least then in that acceptance I have done all I can do within my given scope, duty and responsibility as well as personal power to improve or change the very tiny square inch of the temporal Earth I stand upon; or alternatively I can continue to look at the world that is always out of my reach and throw out more magic spells of opinion, superstitions disguised as reason, mythology portrayed as remedy and potions that ultimately look more like the expression of our collective learned helplessness. So I think to myself (because this is just thinking)at what point then does reputation become another medication of thought leadership rather than factual personal improvement? Ah! The joys of thinking out aloud today is just that, the thinking......M.

It depends on the emploee's position in the company. I couldn't care less about some low to middle level employee thats acting out in his or hers spare time.

The problem about this is that it often can affect their work and lojalty.