We all know that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace and other social networks are a rage right now. Most businesses look at them as a waste of employees time, though a growing number, like Jenaly, look to them to help spread the word about the good work they do for the people and their customers.
In our work, as IT Consultants, the majority of our clients are concerned about their staff wasting time online and possibly posting inappropriate things to these sites that could reflect negatively on the business. These are valid concerns, though it really does seems that most of our clients employees are very responsible individuals.
A growing area of business use for social networks is the hiring process. When you are interviewing potential employees, are you checking their social network presences as part of your routine screening? More and more companies are doing this and claiming that it helps in the hiring process. There is an active debate underway as to whether this is a good thing or not. If a potential employee is using their social network presence to express themselves in a somewhat private way to those they associate with on these networks, is it really and apporpriate measure of their value as a prospective employee? That's a very difficult question to answer and one that will only get more mired in controversy as social networking continues to evolve.
