news 13 Wednesday September 9, 2009 TODAY

Social networking

Would you add your boss as a Facebook friend?

WITH more people using social networking
sites for personal and business purposes, it
is perhaps inevitable that the line between
their personal and professional lives have
become increasingly blurred.
But if the results of an American poll by
human resource firm Robert Half are anything
to go by, many are still not comfortable with
the idea of befriending those with whom they
have a mainly professional relationship.
According to the survey, conducted be-
tween May and June, 50 per cent of respond-
ents were uncomfortable with befriending
clients on Facebook while 62 per cent were
not keen to have vendors as “friends”.
Another interesting highlight: While
executives were most comfortable adding co-
workers as friends on Facebook, nearly one in
It is wise to be prepared
for these types of
(friend) requests.
Mr Tim Hird of Robert Half Singapore
two executives was uncomfortable receiving
“friend” requests from their subordinates or
superiors. No such survey was done here.
Still, as Mr Tim Hird, managing director
of Robert Half Singapore, put it: “While not
everyone is comfortable using social net-
working sites such as Facebook to connect
with professional contacts, it is wise to be
prepared for these types of requests.”
Indeed, Today’s checks with several firms
showed that Facebook has become a tool for
staff to interact beyond the workplace.
Mr Ong Teck Soon, chief executive of
e-procurement service providers Abecha
and Sesami, told Today he leaves it up to his
30-odd employees whether to “befriend”
the companies on Facebook. He has also
asked some staff to look into exploiting
Facebook for business networking.
PR firm The Right Spin is already harness-
ing Facebook for client events. Said account
manager Ethan Ang: “It is used for alerting
people and sounding out their interest.”
According to Robert Half, some com-
mon tricky situations encountered by
company executives on social networking
sites include being tagged in embarrassing
photos, being befriended by someone they
do not want to connect with, and deciding
whether to befriend their bosses.
Users should learn to untag themselves
from embarrassing photos and become adept
at adjusting their privacy settings, it added.
But corporate trainer Iain Ewing believes
those who want to use Facebook and Twitter
are better off knowing the rules of the game
beforehand. “You have to accept that some
of the people who connect with you may not
be the best of friends,” he said. And the key
to avoiding embarrassing photos is to avoid
doing “anything stupid” in the first place.
An ex-laywer and Facebook user, who
wanted to be known only as Mr Wong, said he
would feel uncomfortable befriending those
much higher on the corporate ladder. “They
would then be able to see more of you than
you’d want them to,” said the 27-year-old.

News comment

Bye-bye, Facebook?
Some are saying it’s debuted in 1995. When they were corporations is dependent on user

over for the social purchased by Yahoo! in 1999, users

networking website
Phoebe Connelly
FACEBOOK is done. The New York
Times has declared an exodus from
the popular social networking site.
“If you ask around,” writes Virginia
Heffernan, “you’ll find quitters”.
Why this disillusioned depar-
ture? “It was suddenly clear that
Facebook was not just a social club
but also an expanding force on the
Web, beholden to corporate inter-
ests,” says Heffernan.
If this concern doesn’t sound
familiar, it should.
Consider GeoCities, the online
homesteading service which
bemoaned the new corporate
owners, who disbanded a popular
community leader programme and
declared ownership over anything
users posted to their pages.
And quitting an online space
because it no longer has cachet
isn’t new. Before Facebook became
uncool, commentators were rush-
ing to declare MySpace “over”.
However, as social media re-
searcher Danah Boyd has argued,
the question of which social net-
working tool is cool has less to do
with bells and whistles and more
to do with the usual questions
of race and social class. The real
difference between MySpace and
Facebook? They are nearly tied for
It doesn’t matter if the
purported exodus is real;
what matters are the
questions of corporate
control. Bloomberg
unique visitors, but Facebook has
tended to attract whiter, wealthi-
er, more educated users.
But regardless of what cool
actually means, corporate control
concerns are real ones. When cor-
porations own online spaces, users
do not always have a say in the ways
their online socialising is used.
Facebook faced the same
uproar as Yahoo! when it similarly
announced a change to its terms
of service in February, giving it
greater control over user-content
(it quickly reversed the changes).
The profit being made by these
participation. And while those
polled by Heffernan are largely
concerned about the privacy issues
of having their social interactions
indexed and archived, the less-no-
ticed threat is that by housing our
memories and data in The Cloud,
we risk loss just as much as we do
when we toss the negatives and
stick photos in a box.
So is the exodus real? Who
cares. For as long as we’ve been on-
line, there’s been a next big thing.
Remember when everyone was
buzzing about that new search en-
gine called Google? The real ques-
tion is whether we’ll bother to learn
(yet again) the lessons of mixing
socialising with corporate-control-
led spaces. THE GUARDIAN