Title pretty much says it all – if your employer sent out an email saying, “hey, we have a Myspace/Facebook profile now, why don’t you create a profile and add us” would you?
This is a very real question right now, as my company did just that. We got an email yesterday saying that the company now has a presence on Facebook and we should all create a profile if we don’t already have one and add the company to our friend list. The email was very low-key and it’s not in any way implied that doing so or not doing so will affect our employment status, FWIW.
Personally, I am quite uncomfortable with the idea. I like the idea of keeping my personal life separate from my work life – especially since my employer is 1) exceedingly xtian-bent, and 2) rather homophobic in general terms. It’s not that there’s anything on my Facebook profile that would be detrimental, but I just don’t want them viewing it. I keep it private for that reason. My personal life is just that – personal.
All that being said – would you add your employer? Why or why not?
I don’t have profiles there but I would never link my private life to my professional life that way. Can you have a separate profile and only add professional contacts to it?
No. I don’t have any work information on my profile. Like you, I prefer to keep my work life and personal life separate.
I might feel differently if I didn’t work for a soulless corporation. But in general I think it’s a bad idea. I don’t need my boss seeing my political/religious views or what I did over the weekend.
I’d rather explain my job to my friends than have to explain some of my friends to my coworkers. I don’t know anything about those sites but can your employer see your current profile if they look for it? Ignoring it is good too.
None of my fellow employees seem to have looked me up or friended me, however. There are over 1,000 members in our corporate group, but it’s a multinational corporation (with over 100k employees), and I haven’t met any of them, that I recall.
Were it to be a strictly local phenomena, I would feel kind of obligated to join, because my company places a fairly heavy emphasis on networking, regardless of how frivolously it is implemented.
I have a facebook page and some people I know through work are friends there, but I’m just not much of a social networker. I would be likely to repeatedly “forget” to add my actual workplace.
I do have one coworker as a friend, but he’s IT – do they even count as people?
My profile is set to private, so they would have to be my friend to see anything more than my name and location.
I think the funniest part of the whole thing is that in the email, it said “If you aren’t yet on Facebook, I encourage to do so. The best part is it’s free.” I almost peed my pants trying not to laugh as I read it.
600 coworkers on Facebook and I am friends with none of them. I know many of them, and it’s about 1/5 of my company, but I don’t need them or want them. If I were pressed to, I would create my ‘work identity’ facebook page and add work stuff to it and nothing else.
The student group at LANL just started a group, and I immediately joined it. A group is different than a friend, though; somebody still has to be your friend to join your profile. So, as far as facebook is concerned, it would make more sense for them to have started a group than to have started a profile, IMHO.
I’m not on Myspace or Facebook, so I’d have to join to friend it, and I’m not sure I would.
On the other hand. . . I think it would depend on the job. My present one? No, it’s a crappy retail job, temporary almost by definition. A job which involved a lot of outreach on my part into the community? I’d consider it more strongly.
Not a chance - I join any social networking sites under a pseudonym (and using an email address I would not divulge to any employer) precisely to keep the nosy buggers away from my private life
Yes – on Facebook, at least, because it’s easy to go into Privacy settings and set them up so that my workplace “friends” don’t get to see anything I don’t want them to. I base this in experience, and it’s a win-win – no awkward friendship declines, no info getting to my boss that I don’t want her to see.
Oh hells no. Given that in some business cultures I could actually risk my job just for being honest about who I am as a person, no workmate or employer is ever invited into my personal life. I talk about work at work, and that’s it. I’d certainly not invite anyone from work into a space (real or cyber) where I am (or have been) more relaxed and open about who I am.
My workmates are not my friends. I have always paid dearly for forgetting that, the few times I did.
I don’t think it’s that weird, and it’s not like you’d have to friend all of your personal contacts to your business account (which might be a really bad idea, anyway… your employer could stumble across personal info about you on one of your other friends’ profiles, so better to not make that connection available or easy for them). What I think is weird is that your company went with freakin MySpace instead of one of the business social networking sites like Linked In.
A lot of my co-workers added me as a friend on Facebook. It made me very vaguely uncomfortable when I thought about the “Describe Me” box where my best friend had used words like “whore” and “lazy biatch” and “evil funny diabolical drama queen” to summarise me, and I must remember never to jest that I’m faking a sickie or to bitch about (people at) work on there but… well, if they’re going to come into my private life, they have to expect that I won’t have my work manners on. It has helped me forge friendships with co-workers, which is nice. I have a job, not a career, so it’s probably less of an issue for me.
If I felt at all uncomfortable about it, I would go the separate profiles route. And I’d put my best foot forward on the work profile.
My comfort level would depend on the nature of the job. There have always been jobs where your private life is expected to support your professional life. Back in the day it was things like entertaining clients at home and playing golf with the right people.
Unless the company markets to teens and tweens, I too question the choice of Myspace over LinkedIn for this kind of thing. Facebook is sort of intermediate, and does have privacy settings that can be used to control what you show to whom.
Yes. Most of my coworkers are already my friends on Facebook, including my bosses. Then again, we are a very technology-oriented place, and we do a lot of social stuff outside of work so it doesn’t feel weird.
Absolutely not. My work has no place in my private life and I have heard too many stories about people getting fired for crap that their employers found out about through facebook/myspace. I don’t need to be a part of that.