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Ask Slashdot: Companies That Force Employees To Join Social Networks?
First time accepted submitter rubeon writes "Companies can get a lot of mileage out of social networking services from the likes of Google or Facebook. Chat, document collaboration, and video conferencing using services like Google+ Hangouts or Facebook's Skype are seductive additions to an IT arsenal. But a lot of people have privacy concerns about these services, and there's no shortage of horror stories how these sites track and exploit their users' habits. Would you work for a company that forced its employees to join a social network?"
I'm fairly young and I already start getting reactions along the line of "Are you a criminal or what?" when I tell people I don't have a facebook profile. Also, I'm pretty sure the police would be watching people without public social network presence for they are hiding something for sure. Fortunately for me, they're probably too lazy to get up from facebook.
I don't have any facebook. If an employer required me to get one, it would have company email and nothing personal at all. And time spent on it would be fully billable.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Yes. Part of the interview process at my last job (internet marketing startup) was to check prospects' scores on online tools that measured "engagement" in blogging, Twitter, Facebook, foursquare, Google+, YouTube, etc. The company would also send out emails "requesting" that employees post/Tweet/Like events, books, blog posts, awards, or webinars related to the company, made by friends of/investors in the company, and so on. If you didn't have social media "juice," they weren't interested.
Even for tech support positions they weighed social media marketing knowledge alongside tech knowledge, because you had to defend (or upsell) the product on support calls. It's to the point now where they changed the job title of the phone support position to "Entry-level *ub*potter," presumably because they weren't getting people with marketing knowledge.
They'd ask us to mob people they wanted as guests on their weekly marketing show. I don't know what they expect when they do that; it struck me as annoying.
They're also extremely aggressive about responding to negative or skeptical posts and comments, to the point where they'll join MetaFilter to post a sales-pitch response to a question.
Other than Facebook itself, and Google, has anyone actually been asked to join a Social Network by their employer?
My employer - a university department - decided it needed to have a social networking presence. Since I'm the main web guy, that basically amounted to "we want you to join Facebook and Twitter".
We use it these tools to disseminate news about our department and to try to keep more frequent contact with our alumni. But that's as far as it goes - as far as I know, they couldn't care less about my personal activities on there (and my personal Facebook profile is actually separate from I use for work; but don't tell Facebook that! And I don't use Twitter personally). I've made it a point to not "friend" my boss nor most of the faculty who've asked. My (infrequent) personal posts are all set to "friends only"; and I do my bet not to say anything that could come back to bite me.
Of course it helps that I'm a really boring person.
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