Organizations and Social Networking
The participants expressed themselves against banning of social networking in organizations, either companies or education institutions, is nonsense. It can be like banning Internet use or phone or breaks. It can say something about the health of an organization. It would be nonsensical if an organization is using social networks but their workers don’t have access to them, as stated by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) (see section 2.3.2.11). Social networking must not be misused or abused, especially at work or at school. The individuals must know the risks of misuse and enforce self control for not abusing the use of social networks. Institutions must not ban the activity but they must have made explicit a policy of use, calling the workers to use it with measure, but it would be a stupid thing to do to ban them completely as they are becoming so important. Some parallelisms between the participants’ opinions and the results of the surveys in section 2.2.2 [Cone LLC (2008), EHS Today (2009) and Wentworth (2009)] are found: the participants think that social networks are good for companies and they should use them for marketing of products and communication with their customers; also they acknowledge the need of policies to regulate social networks use; and the impression that some companies might be afraid of their employees using social networks. This fear is clearly stated by Deloitte Development (2009) (see section 2.3.2.11): social networks create challenges for companies when sensitive or confidential information could be exposed by employees.
They could be used at work or at school as well, as reported by the participants, they can be more engaging and friendlier environment to work with distant peers. Farr (2009) commented about social networks use at schools (see section 2.2.1): students are going to have
access to them anyway, so it’s better to grant access and use it to everyone’s benefit. Also it can be an opportunity to teach them about the dangers and net etiquette.