Chip Roberson is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Business Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs are blogging about their experiences.

Think about these two statements for a moment: "It was a business dinner,” and “I know them socially.”

Business and social are terms we use to classify events and relationships. However, in the universe of social-networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., these worlds begin to blend together. The question we often hear is: How do we keep our professional and social lives separate? However, the better question may be: “Should we, can we, keep them separate?”

By definition, one might expect social networks to be reserved for personal use, and why not? Many of us are careful to keep our social lives largely separate from our professional ones. Yet, when we look at how society utilizes these networking platforms, we see businesses and brands everywhere. We use Twitter to share corporate news and to monitor sentiment, and on Facebook we create “pages” where we ask our “fans” to tell their friends about our brands.

In reality, though, business has always depended upon social networks (of the offline kind), we just kept the corporate relationship an arm’s length away. Companies have utilized social networks by hiring people to engage their personal networks to sell their products or by producing advertising to create “buzz.” In fact, the term buzz encapsulates the very idea of a message resonating through society’s “inter-social-net,” to coin a phrase.

As founders of a social-media startup, we are not only working to help others utilize these new networking tools, but we are also trying to practice what we preach. Our goal is to build relationships that help us learn about our market and share our message to those (and only those) who would appreciate it. This gives rise to a question: When I have something to share, should it come from ClickMarkets or from Chip Roberson, co-founder? I am a strong advocate of lifting the corporate veil to let our customers see some of the personality behind our business. It helps build trust.

There are numerous companies where the leadership has little to no public presence, but there are also many companies where the leadership is helping promote the corporate brand. Similarly, many social-media advocates argue that we all have a “personal brand” and that we need to be aware of how it relates to our corporate brands. Yet, in this new world of massively interconnected social networks, what is our “personal brand” in light of the different roles we each play in society (e.g. parent, neighbor, advocate, etc)?

One option is to create multiple accounts on each of these sites to represent the different hats we wear, but the platforms as they exist today are not well suited for that. Facebook wants us each to have one account that treats all friends equally regardless of when, where, or how we know them. Twitter requires us to have a different email address for each new account on their system. Even LinkedIn, which is primarily for business relationships, doesn’t offer a way to separate our connections into groups.

Even if we were able to keep these worlds separate, there are tools out there that are built specifically to reconnect them. Services like Spokeo mine social-networking sites in an attempt to ascertain when two or more personas are really the same person. From the business point of view, this can be a valuable source of business intelligence. However, for a person trying to keep his or her personal and professional lives separate, this may not be desirable.