I don’t want to be one of those ‘I saw an article today’ bloggers, but, I saw an article today. It was at news.com.au and it was talking about how employers have “backflipped” on Facebook and want employees to use it. It was in the business section under ‘innovation’ — I had to chuckle.

“EMPLOYERS have backflipped in the way they view social networking sites at work. More than one in four managers now embrace the use of MySpace and Facebook as “untapped” business opportunities, research revealed today,” the article read.

What a crock of shit.

Here’s what happened: Journalist, Rebecca Beisler (I’m sure she’s lovely, but today wasn’t her day), received a press release from a corporation who did a ’survey’. It sounded interesting. Rebecca cut and pasted three paragraphs from the press release and then figured she’d better call some other people to get their opinion.

Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos said this:

“The internet is set to have an even more profound impact on business. The digital revolution is only beginning to be felt.”

Well fuck me.

RMIT ‘digital expert’ Mark Gregory said this:

“People like to use these sites and tell people what they’re doing. It gets them some happiness and more morale for employees.”

As a university representative you’d think Mark could get some more happiness into his grammar.

What this article really says is that 75% of managers surveyed don’t think social networking has a place at work and 25% of them think there’s probably some sort of untapped opportunity there but they don’t understand enough about it to know what it is, so maybe if they let Gen Y kids play on Facebook on their lunchbreak they’ll figure something out, or at the very least, not quit and go work somewhere else where they can play on Facebook on their lunch break.

If you want to make social media like Facebook and MySpace work for you (as opposed to business networking tools like LinkedIn), you need to figure out how to make it impossible for Cam Hill not to say good things about your brand to his friends (even, gasp, his ones from real life) and you need to understand that employees playing on Facebook at lunch are just like teenagers at the mall.

Don’t believe the hype.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.