Facebook at work isn’t an either/or proposition

For days, department members had ignored emails from a colleague asking for their input on a business matter. This was no overt act of rebellion against the sender of the email. In fact, she was well-liked. Instead, the request got lost in the avalanche of email employees received, or it represented yet another to-do added to an already-daunting list, or they did not spend their days at desks with computers, checking email at common workstations only infrequently.

None of which diminished the sender’s need to get replies. So at home that evening, she sent the same request again, but this time from her Facebook account to the Facebook… Read More »

Recruiters shouldn’t care about that Facebook picture of your beer pong game in college

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college, would you have been hired?”

College is for two things: Getting an education and being stupid. The only difference between college when I went and college today is that there was no Facebook, or anything remotely like it, during my days at university.

… Read More »

The irony of investing in social marketing while blocking your own employees

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009. Twenty-one percent were set to boost their budgets by more than 25%. And worldwide social media advertising was expected to grow 17.3% this year to $2.35 billion.
• A study from the Association of National Advertisers revealed that 66% of… Read More »

More thoughts on work-life integration

Yesterday I shared my thoughts about the shift from work-life balance to work-life integration. My definition (but certainly not the process) is simple: Work-life balance presumes a clear boundary between work and the rest of your life while integration assumes you’ll be doing both all the time.

Some of the comments that resulted from the post challenged the idea of work-life integration, which led me to conclude that I didn’t explain its roots.

I had an engaging exchange on Twitter with Jim Ryan, a staff writer for the Central Pennsylvania Business Journal, who objected to what he saw as my insistence that people in the workforce… Read More »

Online Americans are redefining what it means to be entertained

If you’re going to capture anybody’s attention, you need to do it where they’re spending their time. Increasingly, that’s social networking sites. According to a study from research company NetPop, time spent social networking has exploded 93% since 2006. That means around a third of the time U.S. Internet users spend online is devoted to communicating, not consuming.

Dig deeper into these social networking activities and you find out that people communicate online each week with, on average, 18 people one-to-one and with 110 people through group interaction. And this isn’t just kids, the usual justification for dismissing the… Read More »

FIR Interview: Chuck Hester, iContact, on tapping into the power of LinkedIn

LinkedIn, the business social network, has surged to 30 million profiles, most of them for business people with titles of director or higher. Still, a lot of people get their LinkedIn accounts, expand their networks, then wonder what to do with it. Chuck Hester, communications director for email company iContact, is a LinkedIn power user and author of an upcoming book on the social network. In this interview, Chuck explores the various ways LinkedIn can serve a communicator in his or her work.

Listen to this podcast now:

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• Download the MP3 file (10.1Mb, 22:06)
• Get the show on iTunes
• Subscribe to the FIR Interviews… Read More »

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