There’s nobody here but me

My new boss intimidated the hell out of me.

He intimidated me when I met him during the job interview and the intimidation I felt continued on my first day on the job. He reminded me of Professor Kingsfield (from “The Paper Chase”). He wore a professorial coat that looked as though chalkdust would fly off it if you patted it. He had a close-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and peered at you with piercing eyes over the top of the reading glasses that were perched precariously on the end of his nose. He had a post-graduate degree in organizational psychology. He scared the crap out of me.

At the end of my second week on the job, I poked my… Read More »

Embrace the leak

Among the reasons companies list for blocking employee access to social media is the fear that employees will disclose information they shouldn’t. This usually falls into two categories: compliance (such as posting private information about a customer) and leaks of a company’s intellectual property. This last type of disclosure often includes premature revelations of products that haven’t launched yet.

Most of these situations aren’t unique to social media. Whether their motivations are well-intentioned or malicious, employees have been leaking information for as long as there has been information to leak. On the other hand, the casual… Read More »

IABC 2010 presentation: The gold in your employees’ social graphs

My presentation this morning at the IABC 2010 World Conference expanded on my Stop Blocking theme, articulating the rationale for providing open access to social networks for employees but going a step beyond, identifying the value that can be extracted—ethically, authentically and transparently—from those networks by organizations smart enough to establish supporting models and processes.

What follows is the speaker support, developed in Prezi instead of PowerPoint You can view it full-sized here. Please keep in mind that this is speaker support and is not intended to stand on its own, although I think most of the concepts should be… Read More »

An open letter to leaders of companies who block employee access to social media

Dear Sir or Madam:

I understand your fears and worries. I really do. It’s risky out there where employees may say something they shouldn’t that brings the wrath of a regulatory agency upon your head, where links from Facebook pages lead to sites that exist solely to infect your network, where employees seem to be doing anything but the work you’re paying them to do.

And it’s tempting to deal with it by simply throwing up obstacles to prevent employees from accessing these sites at all, or at least employing tools that let you observe their every online move.

When you hear that these efforts are mostly like in vain because employees… Read More »

Can’t friend requests be a little more sociable?

I currently have 105 pending friend requests on Facebook and a similar number awaiting action on LinkedIn. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with these, since I have no idea who any of them are.

I’ve decided, reluctantly, to simply delete them all.

I’m happy to connect with people whose names I don’t instantly recognize as long as I know what the link is. Of course, I can follow the link to each individual’s profile and see if I can tease the connection out of the information they’ve offered. On Facebook, I can see the friends we have in common to see if I can figure out the connection from there.

But I don’t want to.

The… Read More »

Open access is smart business, not an employee entitlement

At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.

The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his response:

isnt it funny in todays world how everyone thinks they deserve better than what they are getting without haveing to really work for it no job owes you facebook time so feel your rights are being taken for granted grow up you big baby work time is not your fun time so if you…

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