A New York Times article this week had a great headline — Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem.

The subject? People, especially celebrities, getting into hot water for posting tweets without thinking through the consequences beforehand. (The # symbol in the headline, for non-Twitterers, is a hashtag, which is a means to make a user’s post more searchable.)

Today, a lot of people expressed outrage over President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Twitter’s servers were pounded this morning. Some of the outrage turned into humor, some of it clever, some extremely disrespectful. A lot of tweets from leading conservative bloggers, such as Michelle Malkin, gained a wide audience. Yesterday, before the nearly three-hour Twitter downtime, a large number of people were angry with the rock group U2’s singer Bono because he recorded a video shown at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. A lot of those critics apparently forgot that Bono had done the same thing for the earlier Labor Party conference.

So, right or left, there are going to be people who get carried away with their political emotions.

Where does business fit into this? Regrettably, many of the people engaged in the snarkiest Obama remarks were business people, many of them using their business name as their Twitter ID. Their companies may have policies on social media, e-mail or Web usage in the workplace. If so, these people certainly violated them.

Did these people stop and think before they tweeted, or were they “Stuck in a Moment” (a U2 song) and had to get something off their chests? Did the New York financial person who I unfollowed because of some very offensive remarks really think it was a wise business move to assume all his followers shared the same political worldview?

Debate is a foundation of our democracy, and social media provides a great opportunity for people to get their voices heard. However, few businesses have ever succeeded by politicizing the company and polarizing their customers.

Business people using social media: This is yet another reminder. Think before you tweet. Think before you put up that party picture on your Facebook profile.

Keep the lines clearly drawn between your private and professional lives. Don’t let your emotions dictate posting things that could hurt you and your business.