Harmless Fun…?

‘Social Networking’ … what’s it all about then?  Facebook has already taken the world by storm, Twitter is used by everyone I know and according to some sources, over 10% of the world’s professionals have already signed up to LinkedIn.  It sometimes feels as if anyone over the age of 35 is in danger of being left behind by this new technical revolution, in the same way that my parents struggled to ‘set the video’ in those heady post-‘Betamax’ years.

Apparently in the US, over 80% of job vacancies are now filled via interaction with social networking sites in one way or another, but for many of us the penny still hasn’t quite dropped.  I recently listened to a client’s description of Twitter, which to be honest was quite a way off the mark - but what does this all mean for our businesses?

The popularity of Facebook and Twitter has meant that problem number one, rather unsurprisingly is the risk of staff time wasting – which is always going to be difficult to manage.  But, right up there at number two is the risk to a company’s reputation through staff posting potentially ‘undesirable’ comments – a very simple solution would be to get staff to ask themselves – “would you be embarrassed if your boss saw this?” as a quick check.

But what about LinkedIn, which many businesses now actually encourage staff to use to promoted their professional reputation and skills?  This new sales channel is all very well whilst your staff member is out there (wherever ‘there’ is!) diligently building their network of contacts.  But the problems start when they decide to leave.  Are those contacts actually your clients and therefore constitute your client list – or are they your ex-staff members’ personal contacts?  And furthermore, are those names confidential or are they actually already in the public domain?

This quagmire of potential legal wrangles gets even more complicated if your staff start to ‘link in’ with staff at your competition (this is indeed particularly prevalent in the recruitment industry – I have had 3 ‘linked in’ requests from our competitor’s staff this week alone!).  One eminent lawyer has recently suggested that an employee who deliberately ‘links in’ to make a job application more attractive could possibly be guilt of gross misconduct!

The answers to some of these questions are still not clear.  And whilst we await the first high profile court case for ‘database theft’ via Linked In, a sensible starting point may well be to draw up detailed Human Resources policies surrounding the use of Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc.  Social Networking sites and employment law, as with most things are a case where prevention is certainly better than cure.