Often when thinking of social networks, and who uses them, we think of where it orginated and was made for, college. This was true orginially but now, years past, many of the users that were in college are now graduating and leaving for the professional world. This is concerning to many because of the content on college user's profiles.
Companys like IBM are now researching the use of their employee's facebook and their profiles to see how professional their profiles are. The majority of the time, younger employee who used facebook in college have a less professional facebook, this could be observed in pictures or even statuses. [1] Although this seems like a invasion of privacy we really need to evaluate the concerns of the company.
Recognizing there are good and bad aspects in the professional world for social networking, we have to evaluate them:
Most employee need to begin to feel connection with fellow employees to improve the work place and a social network is definitely something that can help with that. Also, it is good for employees to stay in contact with fellow employees to keep up with projects and other things related to work.
But mainly the companies are worried about the interpersonal content on the websites. Younger users tend to put very personal postings on facebook that could be seen as very unprofessional and could threaten the work environment. With this being said, social networking can have benefits but with the format Facebook has given us, it may not always have a place in the professional realm.
With increasing privacy options, users are being to try to work around the obstacles but usually ignore the process altogether. The identity we are giving on Facebook may not be something we would want our employers to focus on, and so it is questionable if we should limit our use once we begin our career.
