Should employers embrace social networking?

[petrefax]

on a related note but with a slightly different angle on it, how about employers trawling facebook looking for shuff to discipline staff on?

there's recently been a spate of this where i work, with certain managers who obviously have little to do trawling through posts up to a year old & hauling staff over the coals using the catch-all reason of "bringing the company into disrepute"

this can be a bit of a grey area IMHO

few examples

1 employee posts something which does blatantly contravene company policy, but does so through the medium of a series of photographs, some of which include other employees. the other employees in the photos also get hauled in, despite not being aware of the OPs post

i pesron posts a status update, an ex-employee comments on this status udate berating the company. OP gets hauled in despite the post not being theirs

whilst i agree status updates along the lines of "<insert company> is a terrible company to work for <insert boss> couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag, all my colleagues are imbeciles, the guy i sit next to stinks of poo & i spent all day today doing absolutely no work..lol..roflmao!!!1111oneelvelen" are obviously out of order, there is a fine line between a company protecting its public image and cyber-stalking of employees

[TooNice]

1 employee posts something which does blatantly contravene company policy, but does so through the medium of a series of photographs, some of which include other employees. the other employees in the photos also get hauled in, despite not being aware of the OPs post

Tough, but is the policy "Don't do it", or "Don't get caught/post about it"? I suspect it's the later.

i pesron posts a status update, an ex-employee comments on this status udate berating the company. OP gets hauled in despite the post not being theirs

I can't agree with this one. Probably a good reason to think long and hard before adding a colleague and set the privacy settings accordingly.

[Lucio]

I think there's a world of difference between businesses embracing social networking and allowing employees free reign to use Facebook/MySpace et al during working time.

For example, as Twitter has shown, there is a definate use for being able to provide an "instant" news stream for certain business types (a bakery is the best example I can recall).


Then there's the flip side, becoming "friends" with your customers, in some areas it could be seen as a bonus, being able to get past problems that might otherwise be insurmountable "oh go on, get this order out for us tonight, I'll owe you one", is an example that I can think of. To be honest though, that means that employees have to sacrifice their privacy to be able to partake in building these relationships, and leads to arkward situations where creepy individuals overstep the mark.

[pauldarkside]

The last time I worked in an office environment, I barely had enough time to keep up with work email and getting my job done. It was perpetual crunch time in that place with you work colleagues being your social circle too. We'd be doing our social networking face-to-face, no need for an artificial version.

We're still all mates 7 years after the place closed. I still don't have a need for Facebook and suchlike. Shame the voting has closed!