Can social media and being public mix when you have to work for a living?

Most companies have policies about "social media use" but these pretty much only apply to things that affect them. So there's two main possible issues: 1. Wasting time. If you're a receptionist or a construction worker who's busy tweeting instead of talking to people and building things, then that's a problem. This ties in to using the company computer - some places care, some places (e.g. in the tech industry) don't care at all as long as you aren't using it to run your side business. 2. Making the company look bad. When you talk about people being "authorized to use social media" I think that may be a policy that you're a bit confused about. You are not authorized to use social media as a representative of the company. Most policies are worded pretty open-endedly but, as a rule, if you have a blog about your cats, your company doesn't care. If you bring humiliation upon them, they are entitled to fire you - that is either by saying things about work they don't want you to say, or by getting sufficient negative attention in the media. There's sort of a third in the form of creating a bad work environment - if you're making Polish jokes, your Polish co-workers will be pissed, similarly for women, Republicans, yadda yadda. I guess the analogy I'd have is a "talking in public" policy - you are not authorized to talk in public by the company. But what that means is, they don't want you to go out there and pretend to give press releases, or tell everyone how (awesome or dumb) your boss is, or crack jokes about your job and/or employer as part of your open mic routine on Friday nights. But if you're cracking jokes about Aunt Millie or traffic, you should be good. So the one thing I'd say is to avoid making jokes about work public; those should be kept to only your co-workers (and it's a tuning exercise to avoid insulting someone or demoralizing folks, but humor always is). If they're relatively anonymized then you're going to be fine, and honestly - 99.9% of the time - no one is looking, and no one cares. It's just when things come to their attention AND piss someone off that the policy gets whipped out.

A good rule of thumb is to not say anything on Twitter or Facebook that you wouldn't say in front of all your coworkers and clients. If you have a goal of being funny on Twitter, use an account entirely separate from your identity. Totally anonymous. And never log into it on your work computer.

Someone I work with has an extremely bawdy and often offensive Twitter account. She does it with no mention of her real name or where she works anywhere on it. It's known about at work but as it isn't connected to her professional life all is fine.

I think it depends on a number of factors like: How high up are you in the company? How "public face" is your job for the company? Is your twitter/fb account strongly associated with your real name and face? As others said, are you doing this at work from your personal device or at work on your work computer? People do get fired for things said on social media and do get fired for humor the company thinks is inappropriate. Two examples that come to mind: A teacher made a joke on fb about killing her students, presumably after a very frustrating day at work. She was fired. And Gilbert Gottfried got fired as the voice of the Aflac duck after he made a joke they felt was in poor taste even though he is a comedian by profession. I think that may have been on twitter but I am not sure. Teachers are in a position of trust and Gottfried was a very public representative of the company. If you are the janitor and your twitter account is not associated with your real name or face, it is probably pretty low risk. Though this is not supposed to be a factor, I would also say it depends in part on how well you get along with people at work and how much you get noticed by others. I seem to get noticed no matter how hard I try to be a wallflower. If I wore something in violation of dress code, I was pretty quickly noticed by higher ups and crabbed at about it. Other women could show up routinely looking like hookers and apparently no one said a word to them about it. So I always felt like I had to tread lightly in all matters.

A teacher made a joke on fb about killing her students, presumably after a very frustrating day at work. She was fired. If the humor you speak of could be in any way construed as you complaining about your job, saying negative things about your company/industry, or threatening violence no matter how obviously facetious, this is potentially a huge deal and a fireable offense. It also just generally looks bad. One of my facebook friends complains about his job constantly in status updates. At one point he worked in my industry and may still aspire to come back into this field. I could easily be in a position to hire him one day, or at the very least be asked to put in a good word for him. I would have a hard time doing that because of the degree to which he bitches about work on facebook. He's quietly burning bridges, and I have a feeling he doesn't even know he's doing it.

If it is disrupting your sleep at 2am then likely you know that you are flirting with danger. One person can give anecdotes about how its all cool at their workplace and another may explain how it is career suicide but only you know the temperament in which you work. About the only solutions are to do a solid job of keeping it anonymous and non-work related in content or dial it down to a level where it doesn't wake you up at 2am.

Are you using your smartphone or the company computer for this? I'm doing the exact same thing you are, but I'm doing it on AskMeFi. Unless you're giving your employer some reason to suspect that you're misusing company resourses or time, I wouldn't worry too much.

Can't speak to how it'll impact where you work now, but I can tell you that when I interview candidates, I search social media to see what they have out there, and stuff like this would count against you.

I tweet from work all the time from my personal phone on my personal account. I've not had a problem, but it really depends on your company's policies. Most actually don't care as long as you get your work done and there's nothing to tie you to the company. Did you get a specific warning from your supervisor that this was noticed? You're not clear on that in your post. Why are you freaking out? If you don't want to be a performer, though, there are other options. You can write sketches. You might want to look into a sketchwriting class in your city. Also, don't count improv out completely. You don't have to be "funny funny" to be a good improviser and you'll learn ways to make funny choices on stage.