No way. It sounds like a trap.
To be clear, my work chose Facebook, not Myspace. While I have a few “workfriends” I do not like them being involved in my personal life at all. The friends I have on Facebook are almost all (with the exception of one odd one that added me because we have the same name) people who have known me the greater part of my life and accept me as I am. Since they have all known me as long as they have, pictures have been posted, thoughts have been spoken, and parties mentioned. Since my employer is very Christian-oriented, I would like to keep my personal life personal.
Don’t get me wrong – even the owner of the company is aware that my husband is Pagan (long story short, the COO that we just lost to cancer knew about my and my family’s philosophical leanings as she and I have talked often & she was the owner’s sister-in-law) and so forth, but I have proven myself more than enough as an asset to the company. Plus, I don’t talk about politics, gods or anything else non-work-related at work with the exception of restaurant reviews 
FYI, you can also set your profile privacy settings so that certain friends can see less of your profile than other friends.
This situation was just an episode of King of the Hill. (warning: link goes to video). “Strickland Propane creates a MySpace page to boost business, but it gets a little out of hand.”
Yes and no.
My last place of employment was a consulting firm that hires lots of 20 and youthful 30 somethings. The company had a strong “frat house” culture of happy hours, dinner and drinks with clients, trips to the strip club, and other corporate boondoggles. In fact, I first joined Facebook through their network and a lot of my Facebook as well as meat friends are from that company.
That said, there is a certain amount of Facebook politics and etiquate one has to think about. As a director in the company, do I link to all of my staff? Do I reject some people and accept others? Do I want to look like the dorky boss trying to be “cool”? Ultimately what I ended up doing was just starting with my peer group (other management types) and then people I was friends with and after that whoever wants to befriend me. For all intents and purposes it’s not much different from being a senior in college, trying to decide which freshmen and sophomores you will allow as your friends.
My current job, no. It’s an older, more conservative insurance company and I hate everyone anyway.
What I have actually done, since I have a lot of friends from different backgrounds and different contexts, is to create “lists”. I can then use those lists to limit what my friends have access to. For example, my coworkers generally don’t have access to my drunken fraternity photos from the early 90s. Kind of keeps things from being embarassing.
Also depends what you put on Facebook. One of my fraternity brothers is an attorney who worked for a conservative national security think tank and is now a adjunct law professor or something. His Facebook profile is basically a conservative (Reagan style, not crazy right-wing style) blog, online resume and advertisement for his publications.
No. I would never entertain the thought. The invite is extremely unprofessional for a company to do IMHO. Privacy filters or not, it’s not a good idea.
I don’t have a Facebook profile, don’t know how it works, so I may be off-base, however…
Even if you filter your profile so work can’t see certain things that you post, most social networking sites I’ve seen display your friends list publicly on your profile, and allows anyone looking at your profile to click on any one of your friends. If one of your personal friends happens to, for example, make an unfiltered post about a party that both of you went to, which you had no intention of letting your workplace know about, well, now your boss knows about it, because you can’t control boss’s idle clicking nor can you control what your personal friend deems filter-worthy.
For a more concrete example, I have a friend who has a LiveJournal account, and he has included both work and personal friends on his friends list. He has posting filters set up, so there are posts his work friends never see, but… he is a lifestyle Dominant. He is not out at work (no reason to be, plenty of reason not to be). Many of his personal LJ friends are also in the scene. Not all of them filter their blog posts, and some who do include BDSM in their “interests.” For him, a workmate is just a few idle clicks away from learning that this friend hangs out with a hell of a lot of kinky people. And if they make exactly the wrong series of clicks, they can read his comments on friends’ posts that clearly show that he has a certain level of knowledge in this area. His work friends are fairly conservative, too; I have heard stories of them standing with their jaws slack because they saw a lesbian couple give each other an affectionate peck on the lips.
The risk of discovery might be relatively low, but if the potential consequences are losing a stable and lucrative job that you’ve held for years (even through shitty economies, which says something), is the risk worth it?
With Facebook, you can’t see the friend’s profile at all unless you and the friend both agree to add each other.
Some time ago, I resigned myself to the fact that people were going to see my facebook. So I took steps to change that profile in many different ways, including using my real name and editing my content. Some of my little nieces and nephews are on there, for goodness sakes!
Sure enough, my boss at my last job suddenly decided to “create” a facebook profile - and i had the delicate sidestep issue because I had posted on there that I was job hunting (it was a pt position - i needed full time). When the company downsized and she was laid off, I added her. And one of her first comments to me was, “wow - you went on a LOT of interviews!”
Point made.
However, I previously worked in radio and it was common for our on-air personalities to have facebook & myspace pages. We did encourage them, however, to make one that was separate from their real pages - and more station-specific. Since many on-air personalities don’t use their real names anyone - it hasn’t been much of a problem. However, not all jocks have an extreme sense of self-editing, and it did land one dj on the street after publicly protesting a recent disciplinary action he had received.
We saw this episode, and have been joking that the person in marketing whose bright idea it was to create the profile must have only watched the first part of the show!
This too. It just feels extremely invasive. As long as it’s not negatively affecting my job performance, what I do on my personal time is absolutely none of my employer’s business.
If it’s the type of business where “entertaining” is a key part of the job, there are simple ways to keep the business/personal divide. Business networking is very different from hanging-with-friends kinds of social activities. If I would be required to go golfing with a client, I’d treat it as a business meeting (outdoors and with accessories, but still a business meeting). We talk about work, or make completely innocuous small talk, but any personal questions would be very quickly diverted back to work topics. (And it’s actually surprisingly easy to do this, in most cases. If someone doesn’t really mean “How are you?” they never notice if you respond “Hey! How are you?” and never answer the question. Similarly for other invasive questions – just answer with a question and they will be happy to talk about themselves and never twig to the fact that they never actually got an answer.)
Dinner at home with someone work-related would never happen. If I had a job where I’m expected to entertain with food, I’d take 'em to a restaurant.
Actually add my work as a ‘friend’? Not a chance. Join an ‘official’ Facebook group? Highly unlikely. I’ve got no reason to do so, so I wouldn’t, and there’s the potential for future abuse of this connection by an employer. However, I do use Facebook for work. I’ve got plenty of colleagues there, but they’re all ones with whom I’d happily have (or do have) a drink with outside of work.
I’ve also got numerous kids on there (limited profile!!), which is a situation which different teachers have different opinions about. Some simply say ‘not at all, never’, and I understand the argument behind this. I’ll only ever deal with those who’ve requested to add me as a friend, I’ll only add those who I know reasonably well, the judgement being ‘If I happened to see them outside of school, would I simply say hello, or stop and have a conversation with them?’ (I teach many of them one-to-one, and therefore often have a closer working relationship with them than a class teacher would typically have.) After that I’ll leave them alone unless I’ve got a specific work-related reason to contact them - that said, I’ve already been in touch with two this evening, one about a timetabling issue, another about future repertoire. Handy to be able to send Youtube links for the latter, too.
Oh, and many of them have me on limited profile, too, which is fine by me!
I wouldn’t add work as a friend, what’s the point? On the other hand I probably have about 60 coworkers as friends, but they’re people I know, not a faceless entity.
What I wonder is why the company created a profile instead of a network – or, like someone else said, a group. I belong to my corporate network (just as I also belong to the Washington DC network and my grad school’s network), but would think it odd for a company to create a “persona.”
Not always: it depends on how each person sets their permissions. Sometimes you can’t see anything, sometimes you can only see a limited profile, and sometimes you can see the whole shebang.