How Employers Feel About Using Social Media at Work

Rob Fox12 years ago

Take it from a guy who used to spend his days at a marketing job he hated Facebooking, G-Chatting, and reading every half interesting story that popped up on his Twitter feed, they aren’t wild about it. This infographic that PayScale put out agrees. Put it another way, writing some vague and self-pitying status like “Ugh I hate Mondays, hope this week doesn’t turn out as rough as I think it’s going to,” is already an indescribably useless activity. Literally the only way it becomes MORE useless is when you do it while someone is paying you to be doing something else. Really the only time it’s technically acceptable to use personal social media at work is when you’re playing on your phone while you drop a work deuce. That’s your time, dammit.

Pretty much everything the inforgraphic says is unsurprising to anyone who has had more than one job in this age of instant useless information. For example there’s this handy stat:

OF COURSE media companies are going to want you to tweet during work. Here at TFM we take pride in having such close contact with our readers via Twitter. I mean granted that close contact is slowly draining my faith in the future of America, but you know, whatever. What’s even more shocking is that only 71% of energy companies have a blanket “no social media” policy. I have no idea who the engineer running a hydroelectric damn would be Facebook chatting with in the first place. My guess as to why more energy companies don’t have a social media policy is because they figure their workers aren’t even on the networks anyway. I can imagine some guy on an oil rig reading a memo about social media and going, “Twitter? That’s that place where people put up pictures of their wieners, right? Why do they think I’m gonna be lookin’ at wieners all day? The fuck is this?”

• [via Mashable]