about companies that block facebook and other social sites.
...If I managed a hedge fund, I’d sell short a basket of stocks of companies that block social media such as YouTube and Facebook and buy stock in the companies that encourage employee use of these new tools.
Here are some of the reasons given by people explaining why their companies block access to social media sites:
• It is a drain to productivity, because people using social media sites and those participating on forums, chat rooms, and blogs are not doing "real work."
• It is a security issue within the company computer systems (because people are logging on to sites outside the corporate firewall).
• People may harm the company brand should employees reveal too much information (gasp! these sites are open access so anyone can see anything).
• It is a bandwidth issue (companies would need to purchase a more robust internet service infrastructure).
I think the big issue here is really one of trust, and the things listed by company representatives as dangers are just excuses. Ultimately, I think the HR and legal people at companies are naïve and scared about what their corporate charges might do in the wide world of the web. Since the HR and legal people don’t really understand social media themselves (and don’t use it for business in their jobs), they just slap on controls.
If you trust your employees, they might surprise you with the ways they promote your business on social media sites. But if you don’t trust them, you end up with only the corporate dregs who don’t mind working in an organization that won’t let them communicate with others in the ways that people are using today, such as social networking, video sharing, blogs, forums, and the like.
full article here
