Take it with a pinch of salt, or two. Social media does have a place in the workplace, but in my opinion just a teeny tiny one. Let me elaborate, the word ‘social’ for me has 2 distinct narratives. The first being the personal ‘social’ life which has its own parameters of family, friends and acquaintances. The second is totally different and what i call the work based ‘social’ life that incorporates colleagues, clients and customers.
For me the two do not mix. Yes, there are overlaps where a friend becomes a colleague (nudge nudge, wink wink) or a new colleague becomes a friend but still there is a great big dividing line between the two. Overlapping is not mixing and does not make the personal and work social arenas compatible.
Related to work, for me the current king of social media for the workplace is LinkedIn. But it doesn’t really function in the corporate workspace does it? Most orgs have their own internal directory usually intranet based, some orgs have products like SharePoint implemented together with its ‘MySites’ feature. But truly how many employees have the time to learn about and create an internal social identity when they have ‘real’ work to do?. LinkedIn works at a wider networking level and is currently most useful for scouring your next job opportunity or checking the background of someone who might be interviewing you imminently. So LinkedIn is traversing the personal and work social arenas, loosely joining them together in a strange way.
I have Facebook (now BranchOut – think ‘LinkedIn’ for Facebook) for my personal social life. I have MySites at work for my work social life. I have LinkedIn that bridges the two (services such as twitter are in this category too). The point I want to make is that I strictly keep the personal and work social areas totally separate from one another.
Yup, no-one I work with now is listed or has access to my Facebook. They cannot see my personal relationships, my photos, what i do in my spare time, what my personal likes are. Why should they? My Facebook is locked down, so even a potential employer cannot check-up on my Facebook profile prior to making a recruitment decision (unless that potential employer is Facebook themselves – got any Architect roles Mark?). I have nothing to hide but my personal life is my own and I will choose who to share it with, hence the previous & ongoing issues of privacy with respect to Facebook being such hot topics. Anyone can look at my LinkedIn profile, that is publicly available as it should be (which some sly recruitment agents use to ring me up on my work mobile via the main switchboard) and many of my current colleagues and many friends are on there too.
In conclusion I cannot see the value in combining the 2 areas, aside from then having only one place to put updates. The disadvantages are many and include a possibility of blurring of the lines between personal and work, what happens when you leave an organisation or god forbid are dismissed, and intrusions into your own life to name a few. So please, don’t be confused, be clear and be careful.
A larger issue is how many social identities does one have to maintain going forwards? That’s a wider issue for another blog post in the near future