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.
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.
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