17% of employees are required to use personal social accounts for work

This happened to me at a startup I worked for and I felt very violated. Since I'm a software engineer I consider my agreed contribution to be focused on software architecture and code writing. One day at our staff meeting the founders had an hour by hour schedule of the day with a staff member's name by each hour. They explained that this was the schedule we were using for "social networking broadcast". At my given hour I was supposed to push our product to my social networks. It was at this moment that I regretted adding my superiors as friends on Facebook/LinkedIn because they would know if I did not actually do it. I very much felt that if I didn't do it, there would be consequences.

If you work in marketing, you may advertise on your resume how many contacts you have in your social networking circles. I do not. I use them to keep up to date with family and friends. For me this was all very unexpected and abrupt. Please don't do this to your employees. I quit less than a month later and at that point I deleted every single mention of the company from my social network. I didn't do that because I disliked the company's product or even the people who worked there. I did it because I felt dirty for what I had been forced to do.

I think the important thing is that it is clear up front when taking a job whether or not your "private" social network will be controlled by the company. If I had known that they felt they had the right to control my posts, I would not have taken the job.

To understand that how much this is a violation and inappropriate, it's helpful to imagine the same scenario happening but the other party is someone you are dating. Someone you are dating is more appropriate to have access with one's personal social networking accounts than an employer, so if it seems a problem with the friend, it should be considered even more a problem with the employer.

Consider the person you are dating saying to you, "We're going to go on your social network accounts so you can post to everyone how much you love me and how much you want all your friends to like me." What would be the reaction to such a demand? Does the demand seem normal and reasonable?

Consider the person you are dating saying to you, "I need you to promise me that, no matter what happens in the future, you will never say anything bad about me to any of your friends or family on social media. I also need you to sign this contract agreeing to damages if you ever say anything bad about me." What would be the reaction to such a demand? Does the demand seem normal and reasonable?

I suggest that should these scenarios take place with a trusted friend, it would not only damage the trust, it has a significant likelihood of being an inappropriate enough red flag to be a deal-breaker that ends the relationship, and casts the other party as crazy, desperate, abusive and/or unhinged.

Hold on a sec... I'm calling BS on this.

I don't know what their experimental methodology is, but according to the article, 17% are REQUIRED to do write nice things about their employers in social media and another 27% are ENCOURAGED to do so. That's 47% or about half of all people.

That's just not true. Half of all people are NOT shilling for their employers on Facebook. Perhaps there is some small group in which this occurs, but I see almost no signs of it in my social circles, and honestly, do you see that? HALF of everyone?

I'm not dismissing the issue as unimportant, but I'm dismissing the data from the survey as clearly flawed or else applicable only to some special subgroup.

if my current or future employer ever required me to associate my personal accounts with work in any way as a condition for continued employment, i'd tell them to go f*ck themselves. in fact, i now ask about any such policy in interviews and if they get the answer wrong, i walk out the door.

no employment opportunity is worth selling out your personal life.

the only acceptable condition may be a _promise_ not to post negative things on your personal account while employed.

just my $0.02

Ugh.... 17 percent of our anonymous respondents so far told us they are required to use their personal social media accounts

No selection bias there, I'm sure. venturebeat is read by a wide cross section of the employee demographic, right?

Yeah when my company got a new IT Communications Director and asked we like them on Twitter and Facebook, I was nauseated that many people did so. I refused, and I considered writing a stern email about how disgusting such a practice was to me.

My social networks are not part of the job, sorry. If you want them, you can pay me extra, since marketing firms pay for that data in bulk too I want to be paid for shilling just like others.

There is a definite issue with this in the developer space regarding how API keys are connected to user accounts, and the policies employed by companies like Google, Facebook and Apple regarding duplicate, fake, or pseudonymous accounts. It's sometimes hard to know what the correct approach is to working with Facebook developer tools, adSense accounts, or testing iOS apps on your own phone, without forever tying your corporate identity to your personal one. As single accounts cross lines into social networks as well as development capabilities it becomes hard to keep work accounts and personal accounts separate.

While the figure might seem shocking, keep in mind this is 17% of employees who responded to the VentureBeat survey, not of all employees, and that not only we don't even have a sample size, but on top of that the survey is only "about a third of the way done".

Not only is this a highly biased subset (VentureBeat readers) in the first place, but the question is very poorly defined: "Are you required to use your personal social account(s) for work purposes? [yes/no/not required but encouraged]". What does "encouraged" means? What count as "social accounts" (arguably, the consequences are not the same if they ask for my Facebook than my Linkedin)? What does "work purposes" mean? Is it merely suggesting that at an all hands meeting that employee support the newest marketing campaign, or is this actively pressuring employees into writing positive statuses about their company on Facebook? If the documentation on how to use Jobvite includes a section on how to share job postings on Linkedin, does this count as being encouraged?

I don't want to minimize the issue because there are definitely cases of employers crossing the line of what is acceptable, but these results looks completely worthless to me .

One thing that's nice about G+ is you get a separate account for work if your company uses Google Apps. This at least lets you proselytize for your company without annoying your friends, and keeps personal stuff away from work associates if you so desire.

(I'm not sure if it's confusing or not for two people to show up if you search for my name. Hopefully my choice of profile picture guides people in the right direction.)

I think the more disturbing trend would be the personal data they post on the company site.

Name and photo? I guess that's kind of standard (even if not the best privacy-wise)...

But your personal cell number? Someone please find the companies in question so we can grab the CEO's phone number and tell him that's not okay.

Make a work account for that company and keep it separate from your personal account. Never accept your coworkers on social media sites. How hard is this?

Interestingly enough approximately the same percentage of employees seem to voluntarily use their social accounts for work.

The whole thing is sort of dumb to me, most people in question probably have a very small number of connections (followers, friends, subscribers, etc) and an even smaller number in the right circles.

I would imagine that those with a few thousand connections or more would never agree to do this without being totally into it anyway.

This was a huge point of contention with my last employer regarding Wikipedia edits of the company's listing in the site.

At one of my old jobs we were told that our Social Media specialist would be writing short snippets for us to post from our own social accounts as if we had written them. Normally I'm pretty causal in this area (I like talking about work) but having prewritten ad copy was pretty creepy. Needless to say, I moved on soon after that.

Some people seem to think that the Internet is some magical medium that's somehow different from real life. It's not. If you wouldn't ask someone to do it in an offline setting, don't ask them to do it in an online setting.

Would you ask your employee to go door-to-door to all their friends houses and knock on the door and give them a sales pitch? No? Then you shouldn't ask them to shill for you on Facebook.

If you want to advertise on Facebook, there's already a way to do that.

We actually have links to all of our employee's LinkedIns on our site. I personally have no problem with it. Hell, in the long run it will probably help me get another job at some point at best, or do nothing at worst. But I will refuse to use it as a marketing thing or do any other social networking linked to the company, since LI is the only professional network I'm a part of.

That infographic is truly awful and I feel sorry for the poor guy who spent a few hours putting it together and carefully aligning stuff until it's 'just right'. Know when to kill your baby - it's never too late to walk away from something that isn't working.

I guess it's too late if you've already merged your professional and personal online identities, but one way to work this is to create a sanitized professional account for this purpose, and change the name on your "real" personal account to something different.

Regarding facebook, the majority of my social life there takes place in a private group, that a strong plurality of my friends are in.

It works pretty well, and it makes Facebook useful for impromptu get-togethers again.

Required to use them for what?