Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Thanks To Social Media, You Are Being Watched By Employers

Click Here for Penn Olson Article

Twitter images[1] myspace

Well, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.  We wanted Social Media and got it.  We wanted Ubiquity (look it up!) and got it.  We wanted cool and easy user interfaces (Web 2.0) and got it.  We also wanted huge numbers of people to participate and got that too.

So why are folks so surprised that employers are using Social Media to screen prospective employees and monitor current employees?  With all the rich-content services in Web 2.0, web traffic has increased and companies are looking closely at their own internet usage by their employees.  As a result, many companies are blocking access to Social Media sites.  Remember, the internet access at your office is for business use, it is not a perk.

Here’s good advice – Don’t post anything (text, image, video or audio) that you wouldn’t be comfortable with your boss seeing or your mother.

B

2 comments:

Ed said...

An additional caveat - do not send an e-mail that cannot be shown to your parents or young child from work. You might think that unloading on your boss to a buddy in an e-mail is OK, but it will come back to haunt you.

I once saw an VP fired from a company after posting negative comments on a financial blog (posted from a work pc.)

Barry Rubin said...

Amen. You are what you post !