Maybe what you are getting at is "are we okay with jobs where your personal social media account is a job function?". I personally think no, but at this point, we can't put the "social media" genie back into the bottle, and it is only going to get worse with products like Glass.

Many journalists nowadays have a twitter account because of their work, and news websites syndicate from their personal accounts.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there's an increasingly blurry line between someone's employment status and someone's personal views and I think that should be extremely uncomfortable for everyone involved and generally means our community will be less likely to engage in honest and forthright dialog as people with personal views.

And I think the extent of this is a whole big can of worms I'm not sure I'm in a great position to address as a researcher at a university with surprising levels of freedom to shoot my mouth off and not care what anyone else thinks.

While I personally know plenty of people in evangelist roles and while I consider them friends, I can't say I'm qualified to really talk about where a line should be wrt separating their personal and professional speech. I hope someone who is qualified to discuss it approaches this point, because I think it is worth discussing and increasingly important.

tl;dr: I really hope this discussion continues but I'm probably not the right person to talk about it down this particular wormhole.

The distinction between "professional life" and "personal life" is artificial anyway. Business connections are regularly between people who are friends outside of business. The way you act at the bar may be seen by business contacts. Reputation gets around. Social media is just making it more apparent.

Some things are different in because of it - but honestly if you care about your public image, you shouldn't share 'private ' jokes on a very public medium.