“Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun.” — Pete Cashmore, Mashable CEO

COMMUNICATIONS technology has brought to us a mixed bag of goodies. Social media network, mobile telephony and e-mail has meant connecting at the speed of light; almost instantaneous feedback and exposure to a vast and glorious global marketplace, among a plethora of positives that can only make business easier. On the flip side there are hideous monsters stalking the Internet highway which itself has become cratered with dangerous potholes that threaten to derail the man-made technological progress.

Stop and look for a moment at the use and abuse of social media in the workplace where some of us spend most of the waking hours of our lives. Most offices whose employees have computer access give their workers Internet access so there is a wide open swinging gate for most people to trip the light fantastic in the most popular interfaces, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube and even Skype. If your company’s management police these sites it is easy for them to see what you do when you are in your non-working mode, that is, when you let your hair down. So, it might be wise to be careful and circumspect in your general postings. For example, my advice would be for Marjorie in Marketing not to post photos of her latest dancehall/soca, dutty winin’ antics from the latest weekend ‘bashment’ if she is the one who regularly leads the department’s morning devotions. Social networks have in one fell swoop taken down that high fence that once guarded our privacy.

Does your company allow up unfettered access to the social media networking sites of your choice? Do you think they should?

When boredom sets in at work, amusement is just a finger click away for us on the computer’s keyboard. The report that should have been completed last week gets side-tracked for that day while we go check in on Facebook, aka, Fassbook, to nose around and see what the beautiful people are doing with their lives. For some it is easy to create a make-believe existence and personae in this connected world where image is everything. So, while we think Robert in the Operations Department is hard at work churning our reams and reams of useful company date, he is instead, busily re-creating himself as a macho, Jamaican playboy to the people in his ‘internet world’ and spending hours conversing with his ‘peeps’ and building up that ‘wanna-be playa’ image. As is human nature, if there are no established systems of checks and balances, policies and procedures in the workplace, not to mention boundary setting, people tend to go wild and spend hours of the company’s time, surfing the web on the pretext of ‘doing research’.

It is no wonder that it was reported in 2009 that more than half of the companies within the Unites States blocked employees’ access to social networking sites, according to a study done in that year by Robert Half Technology. The study revealed that, 19 per cent of the companies surveyed let employees use sites such as Facebook and Twitter only for business purpose, while 16 per cent of them allow only limited personal use.

International Association of Business Communicators on-line technology guru, Shel Holtz points out that companies block social media access because of, “fear, uncertainly and doubt”. He said that companies block employee access because they fear that “productivity will suffer”. However he points to studies from Mindlab International and the University of Melbourne which show that productivity actually increases when employees are able to visit on-line social networks. “Further, those employees who are not productive because of time spent on Facebook won’t automatically become paragons of productivity when access is taken away; they’ll just go back to being unproductive using same distractions they used before Facebook.”

Some management will argue however that without these firewalls and restrictions the work agenda will be sidelined, deadlines will suffer and financial targets will not be met. Further, if access is not blocked, providing computers and Internet access will make management complicit. Then there are of course the power-hungry managers who are gleefully orgasmic when they have something else to add on to the ever-expanding list of “things employees cannot do”.

Another reason that companies give for blocking employees access is that “access to social networks will introduce viruses to our network” and “consume critical bandwidth”. The latter Holtz says is a legitimate concern that relates mostly to streaming media such as YouTube videos. “However companies never elected to kill print publications because they didn’t have enough paper. Bandwidth is the paper of the digital era and the business case can be made to obtain more”.

It is my view that if at all exposing social media to employees meant additional revenue, many company would not hesitate to open up the access to one and all and they would find a way to make it work. As Shel points out, “most companies haven’t yet recognised the value they can extract from their employees’ social graphs, the means by which the interconnections between people, groups and organisations are illustrated”. One of the exceptions he pointed to was Sprint, the US wireless company which does not limit what its employees do on-line nor monitors their activities, but empowers them to engage directly with the customers. Feel free

to visit the website, www.StopBlocking.org that provides information on company efforts to block employee access to social media and why this is bad for business.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with ROCommunications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.