I'm told that the big corporations provide jobs for millions of people who like to believe they are secure there. That's not been my experience, but what do I know? I've been an entrepreneur for most of my life and never set policies for thousands of employees.
From my limited point of view, all employees of any sized company are people.. I do know a few things about people. 350 million of them are now on Facebook, with about a million per day joining. You got to figure that your employees, your customers and the public have found Facebook by now. I suspect that most employees with a computer know about it.
Yet today I'm reading Advertising Age (sorry no link.. I'll explain below) and read that as many as 70% of companies surveyed are banning social media in the workplace. The article goes on to show how this is a dumb policy (duh) and suggests that "social media is like recess" and that happy employees will be more productive.
Recess?
To be fair, the lower ranking bullet points suggest that an employee may be able to keep up with information about their field and that maybe "brand evangilize" .. then concludes that we ought to consider letting folks use social media at work.
I was amused at the baby steps the author of this article was taking. I decided to leave a comment and suggest that "social media in the employee benefit package" is behind the times and that we should be pushing our people to use social media more to give better customer service, speed up communications and advance the goals of the company.
I wanted to leave a comment.. but Advertising Age still requires a login to participate.
I guess they think that commenting on their articles is recess and a privledge that I have to earn. No problem.. I'll just log in and.. Wait! What's this, you need me to confirm? ... I can do that, Fire up the email window and click a link. DONE!
OK.. back to the article, scroll to the bottom, smile at the discussion about security issues and employees wasting time (so 2005).. there it is, the comment box. Typed in my 2 cents worth of added value and my user name and password and hit SUBMIT.
A new surprise.. another log in page. DRAT.. I've probalby lost my comment... no wonder I seldom comment on old media sites.. but I'm determined and log in for the 4th time.
That's when I see this message:
This comment will cost you 1 credit. You have zero credits
That's when I decided to put my comments here. No need to take on the old media, I'll just bypass them... all I need is a link to that article. But first, let me reread it to make sure I'm quoting them right.
Oops. Can't do that either. Seems my log in has alerted the system that I'm more engaged than a casual reader.
Access to this article is restricted to Advertising Age subscribers... click here to order
Advertising Age... the voice of the 20th Century Corporate Communications Paradigm (and quickly becoming irrelevant)
Posted via web from Warren Whitlock's Best Seller Book Marketing Posterous
Labels: advertising age, facebook ban, marketing in the future, social media
What would it be like all your friends were accessible by Twitter the way they are by phone?
