We’ve all seen warnings and stories about people getting fired from their jobs because of status updates or photos on social medial sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. CNN is has a new one with some social networking don’ts 1. Don’t announce interviews, raises or new jobs 2. Don’t badmouth your current or previous employer 3. Don’t mention your job search if you’re still employed First I think number 2 should include – “or coworkers”, really nothing good can come of that either. But the point I want to add for librarians (library workers) everywhere is 4. Don’t badmouth your customers. We all get frustrated, we all have bad days, I understand that, but venting on social media sites isn’t the solution and it could cause real problems for your library. Your customers may read what you wrote, they are more tech savvy than you give them credit for. In addition to some old fashioned hurt feelings this can lead to some real problems for your library. They could complain to someone at the library, which means staff will need to spend time dealing with this issue. They could email it all their friends or maybe the newspaper, this is
Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go
The issue of control comes up over and over again when we talk about the online world. It recently it came up at Internet Librarian in many different ways, including: How do I stop a staff member from wasting time on Facebook? How do we control what staff are saying online? Management wants everything posted online (Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) to go through PR. We don’t want employees to be able to access social networking sites? What about privacy? We can’t allow just anyone to post a comment without approving it first. How do we know a student is who they say they are? I have answers to all of these questions, but these questions aren’t what this is about, what they represent is, control. Or the illusion of control. The desire for control comes from fear. Fear of change, of the unknown, of doing things differently, of a situation not created by us, of taking risks. It is human nature to fear these things, it’s how we’ve survived. So is adaptation and times are changing, just as they always do, and we need to adapt. In the internet age your image/brand no longer belongs to you. It belongs to
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