Local first amendment lawyer Kevin Goldberg was nice enough to give us an interview about defamation issues shortly after Meg of 2Birds1Blog was fired for blogging. He’s since written a piece at his firm’s blog about the issues from the other side of the desk called coping with social media in the workplace.
How many of your employees do you think are looking at their Facebook pages right now? Good guess. Now walk down the hallways and see if you can catch any of them in the act. Go ahead, we’ll wait. We expect that, unless your guess was “probably all of them”, you were way off.
As you can see, it’s written more with a mind for the employer but it’s good reading for any employee as well, I think. It’s useful to know what kind of mindset your bosses probably have and the things they worry about. Particularly so if your bosses don’t have any policy in place because it might give you some idea of how shocked they’d be if they were confronted with your personal activities.
Well I used to say something in my profile about not quite being a “tinker, tailor, soldier, or spy” but Tom stole that for our about us page, so I guess I’ll have to find another way to express that I am a man of many interests.
Hmm, guess I just did.
My tastes run the gamut from sophomoric to Shakespeare and in my “professional” life I’ve sold things, served beer, written software, and carried heavy objects… sometimes at the same place. It’s that range of loves and activities that makes it so easy for me to love DC – we’ve got it all.
Good post Don. It’s difficult at our work to see who’s “working” on Facebook and who’s “playing.” We do social media for a lot of large companies in St. Louis so Facebook is ALWAYS up. I do admit, I’ve gone astray a few times – the occasional “hmm I wonder if Craigslist has anything cool right now,” or “well as long as I’m on Facebook I might as well check my own.” But I think some people take advantage of the freedom they have in the workplace – like logging onto facebook at 5pm and noticing one of your co-workers “found a baby calf on their farm in Farmville” at 2pm. Hmmmm…wonder what they were doing all day? Moral of the story, it’s really hard to tell what’s work and what’s not from a distance – there really isn’t a way to monitor it all the time without seeming like a dictator. You just need to put trust in your employees and remind them that Mafia Wars can wait til they punch out.