Make a work account for that company and keep it separate from your personal account. Never accept your coworkers on social media sites. How hard is this?
Because coworkers can become friends, and friends can become coworkers. The two are not wholly disjoint sets, nor should they be. What is needed is a separation of function, not a separation of people. Two accounts, perhaps with shared people, but with the intent of one being personal communication, and the intent of the other being professional.
Imagine if somebody built a social networking site where you could have one group of contacts, but sandbox them into their separate circles of function/relation. Such a website would surely eat all others for breakfast. ;-)
This happened to me at a startup I worked for and I felt very violated. Since I'm a software engineer I consider my agreed contribution to be focused on software architecture and code writing. One day at our staff meeting the founders had an hour by hour schedule of the day with a staff member's name by each hour. They explained that this was the schedule we were using for "social networking broadcast". At my given hour I was supposed to push our product to my social networks. It was at this moment that I regretted adding my superiors as friends on Facebook/LinkedIn because they would know if I did not actually do it. I very much felt that if I didn't do it, there would be consequences.
If you work in marketing, you may advertise on your resume how many contacts you have in your social networking circles. I do not. I use them to keep up to date with family and friends. For me this was all very unexpected and abrupt. Please don't do this to your employees. I quit less than a month later and at that point I deleted every single mention of the company from my social network. I didn't do that because I disliked the company's product or even the people who worked there. I did it because I felt dirty for what I had been forced to do.
I think the important thing is that it is clear up front when taking a job whether or not your "private" social network will be controlled by the company. If I had known that they felt they had the right to control my posts, I would not have taken the job.
> They explained that this was the schedule we were using for "social networking broadcast". At my given hour I was supposed to push our product to my social networks.
Is it common for startups to sacrifice their employees' social capital at the altar of "growth hacking"?
Early startups such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter all very much relied on their employees' social and professional networks for their initial growth.
And this is why we need decent employee protection law. Here in Europe you can't be fired "at will" like one can in the USA, so you can tell a boss who asks for this, to go stuff themselves.
I can't imagine working at a startup if it wasn't a place that I would be happy to promote on social media. Why not just get a megacorp job if you're not excited about what you're working on?
It's an interesting topic to me. I've worked places where the whole team happily liked, upvoted, and retweeted company posts, as we were all rather excited about the posts ourselves. Messages might get sent out like "Hey, everyone like our new FB page!". Especially in a startup, I don't generally have a problem with being asked to help promote things.
On the other hand, at one place an email went out saying everyone was required to make a tweet or fb post about our new promotion. I immediately went to my manager and said there was no way that was happening by me, and as many of us in the company had overlapping social networks, it would be very transparent and spammy looking to outsiders. The language was changed to "highly suggested" and I was never bothered about it again, but it left a bad taste.
Gently asking for a like or upvote is one thing, but I'm not writing or posting anything on my personal accounts on behalf of the company.
That was exactly what had changed for me that day. I had already liked the company on my Facebook page out of choice and was perfectly happy to genuinely show support in my own way. Telling me at what hour I needed to post a particular link to my Facebook page was way over the line for me. It also did not work in the long run. It sent me violently in the other direction of removing all my genuine support. All that said, there were other staff members who did not seem to be bothered. In fact, I was the ONLY person on the team who showed any alarm, so maybe it is partially a personality thing.
Interestingly enough approximately the same percentage of employees seem to voluntarily use their social accounts for work.
The whole thing is sort of dumb to me, most people in question probably have a very small number of connections (followers, friends, subscribers, etc) and an even smaller number in the right circles.
I would imagine that those with a few thousand connections or more would never agree to do this without being totally into it anyway.
if my current or future employer ever required me to associate my personal accounts with work in any way as a condition for continued employment, i'd tell them to go f*ck themselves. in fact, i now ask about any such policy in interviews and if they get the answer wrong, i walk out the door.
no employment opportunity is worth selling out your personal life.
the only acceptable condition may be a _promise_ not to post negative things on your personal account while employed.
Yeah, I really don't want my personality associated with the company I work for. I love my company and I believe in the things we do, but I am so much more than an employee. My Facebook profile says nothing about who I work for, nor do I talk about my company to friends and family except if they're looking for a job or if I'm directly asked what I do/what I'm working on.
I wouldn't talk bad about my company and I would agree that people who talk bad about their company yet continue to work there have some strange priorities, but I don't talk much good about them either. I just don't talk about it at all.
There is a definite issue with this in the developer space regarding how API keys are connected to user accounts, and the policies employed by companies like Google, Facebook and Apple regarding duplicate, fake, or pseudonymous accounts. It's sometimes hard to know what the correct approach is to working with Facebook developer tools, adSense accounts, or testing iOS apps on your own phone, without forever tying your corporate identity to your personal one. As single accounts cross lines into social networks as well as development capabilities it becomes hard to keep work accounts and personal accounts separate.
Yeah when my company got a new IT Communications Director and asked we like them on Twitter and Facebook, I was nauseated that many people did so. I refused, and I considered writing a stern email about how disgusting such a practice was to me.
My social networks are not part of the job, sorry. If you want them, you can pay me extra, since marketing firms pay for that data in bulk too I want to be paid for shilling just like others.
To understand that how much this is a violation and inappropriate, it's helpful to imagine the same scenario happening but the other party is someone you are dating. Someone you are dating is more appropriate to have access with one's personal social networking accounts than an employer, so if it seems a problem with the friend, it should be considered even more a problem with the employer.
Consider the person you are dating saying to you, "We're going to go on your social network accounts so you can post to everyone how much you love me and how much you want all your friends to like me." What would be the reaction to such a demand? Does the demand seem normal and reasonable?
Consider the person you are dating saying to you, "I need you to promise me that, no matter what happens in the future, you will never say anything bad about me to any of your friends or family on social media. I also need you to sign this contract agreeing to damages if you ever say anything bad about me." What would be the reaction to such a demand? Does the demand seem normal and reasonable?
I suggest that should these scenarios take place with a trusted friend, it would not only damage the trust, it has a significant likelihood of being an inappropriate enough red flag to be a deal-breaker that ends the relationship, and casts the other party as crazy, desperate, abusive and/or unhinged.
I don't know what their experimental methodology is, but according to the article, 17% are REQUIRED to do write nice things about their employers in social media and another 27% are ENCOURAGED to do so. That's 47% or about half of all people.
That's just not true. Half of all people are NOT shilling for their employers on Facebook. Perhaps there is some small group in which this occurs, but I see almost no signs of it in my social circles, and honestly, do you see that? HALF of everyone?
I'm not dismissing the issue as unimportant, but I'm dismissing the data from the survey as clearly flawed or else applicable only to some special subgroup.
Agree...headline needs to be qualified "sampled" employees. There is no way I would generalize a small number to the larger population of employees (as in, US population), given surely the uneven distribution of this type of "work" requirement in terms of geography, industry, and job-level (etc).
One thing that's nice about G+ is you get a separate account for work if your company uses Google Apps. This at least lets you proselytize for your company without annoying your friends, and keeps personal stuff away from work associates if you so desire.
(I'm not sure if it's confusing or not for two people to show up if you search for my name. Hopefully my choice of profile picture guides people in the right direction.)
While the figure might seem shocking, keep in mind this is 17% of employees who responded to the VentureBeat survey, not of all employees, and that not only we don't even have a sample size, but on top of that the survey is only "about a third of the way done".
Not only is this a highly biased subset (VentureBeat readers) in the first place, but the question is very poorly defined: "Are you required to use your personal social account(s) for work purposes? [yes/no/not required but encouraged]". What does "encouraged" means? What count as "social accounts" (arguably, the consequences are not the same if they ask for my Facebook than my Linkedin)? What does "work purposes" mean? Is it merely suggesting that at an all hands meeting that employee support the newest marketing campaign, or is this actively pressuring employees into writing positive statuses about their company on Facebook? If the documentation on how to use Jobvite includes a section on how to share job postings on Linkedin, does this count as being encouraged?
I don't want to minimize the issue because there are definitely cases of employers crossing the line of what is acceptable, but these results looks completely worthless to me .
That infographic is truly awful and I feel sorry for the poor guy who spent a few hours putting it together and carefully aligning stuff until it's 'just right'. Know when to kill your baby - it's never too late to walk away from something that isn't working.
We actually have links to all of our employee's LinkedIns on our site. I personally have no problem with it. Hell, in the long run it will probably help me get another job at some point at best, or do nothing at worst. But I will refuse to use it as a marketing thing or do any other social networking linked to the company, since LI is the only professional network I'm a part of.
I guess it's too late if you've already merged your professional and personal online identities, but one way to work this is to create a sanitized professional account for this purpose, and change the name on your "real" personal account to something different.
At one of my old jobs we were told that our Social Media specialist would be writing short snippets for us to post from our own social accounts as if we had written them. Normally I'm pretty causal in this area (I like talking about work) but having prewritten ad copy was pretty creepy. Needless to say, I moved on soon after that.
Some people seem to think that the Internet is some magical medium that's somehow different from real life. It's not. If you wouldn't ask someone to do it in an offline setting, don't ask them to do it in an online setting.
Would you ask your employee to go door-to-door to all their friends houses and knock on the door and give them a sales pitch? No? Then you shouldn't ask them to shill for you on Facebook.
If you want to advertise on Facebook, there's already a way to do that.
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