Monday, January 24, 2011

Taking Facebook to work

Lots of Canadians use social media while at work. I'm sure we're not alone, of course, but a story in the Toronto Star last week contained some eye-popping numbers on just how pervasive it is.

I spoke with CTV News Channel's Marcia Macmillan on Sunday afternoon about all the time we're apparently frittering away updating our statuses and tagging each photos of each other. My conclusion? It's not as dire as it looks. Here's the video.

Your turn: Do you use social media at work? For personal use? Professional? Both? Does your boss know/care? Should this even be an issue?

8 comments:

Chanel said...

I do use Facebook at work. My boss knows, and no, he doesn't care. As long as I do my job, which is most days to greet people and answer phones and generally look pretty, he doesn't have a problem with it. Though our customers sometimes do. And my other coworkers also use their facebooks at work, although they sometimes actually use it for work related purposes and my facebook use is generally personal.

Alexia said...

At school it is blocked for the kids but until about 6 months ago we teachers were able to access it - however, it has now been blocked for everyone, mainly because of some teachers allowing kids to use their logins.

Probably a good thing we can't access it - some people would spend too much time on it!

SY said...

I just use it on my cell.. eventhough use of cell phones isn't allowed

Jules~ said...

That was an interesting interview. Thank you for the point of view. I have to admit that I am a bit naive about the whole thing. Even though I really enjoy spending time blogging, I refuse to open a facebook account or twitter type of thing because I worry about the time demands it would take to 'be social'.
I can see your point though with it being used at work as a significant way of networking people together simply because it is so widely used.

Blessings to you today.

Rebecca said...

for me it's a way to keep busy when i'm stuck home alot i like the silly games

colleen said...

Good point, Carmi!

I get a lot of ideas from Facebook. I use it like I use my blog, part personal, part writer's tool. Some blog posts get more comments on Facebook than at the original site.

me said...

I had to walk away from Facebook. I was addicted to the games, total time suck, wasn't blogging, reading or playing with my boy as much as I should have. As for the social part? I email the folks I want to or use the phone. I never posted personal stuff, I found it kind of creepy. I didn't delete my account because I have been lucky enough to find a few folks through it, but I only check in every 3 or 4 months now. I don't really miss it.

Mark said...

It is completely blocked here at work, and in fact I often can't comment on blogs hosted on blogger, can't view Flickr pictures, pbase albusm, picasa albums, etc., which sucks the fun out of many photo blogs, etc. that use such "free" hosting services. That's why I host my blog on my own domain and run Gallery2 on my host -- because I want to at least be able to pop something out to my own sites if needed.