A lot has been written about Web 2.0 applications and their ability to build employee engagement. I agree – but my eyes are wide-open regarding publicly viewable sites. There are some less-than-noble people who are exploiting Facebook for their own purposes. Let me explain.

My daughter was recently accepted to a college on an early decision basis. One of her first moves was to search Facebook for her new class / school group. Interestingly, there were two. As it turns out, one group was formed by some new students. The other group was formed as part of a viral marketing campaign by a company interested in targeting college students. Not only had this company formed a group at my daughter’s school, they had formed a group for over 200 schools.

If you would like to see how Web 2.0 really works, this post shows how the company behind the viral marketing campaign effort was “busted.” A group of students and administrators worked together to identify, investigate and expose the program in a matter of hours. It is a fascinating read. It took the Journal of Higher Education quite a few days to catch on.

A few thoughts:

• Think twice before you start to bend the internet’s rules. You will get caught and you will be embarrassed.
• Know that somebody will be targeting your employees. A Facebook group for General Electric Finance is filled with recruiters looking for candidates and “students” looking for information about “business models.”

“Managing the message” is incredibly hard in a Web 2.0 world, but ignoring what is happening out there is not smart. Somebody in your organization needs to be responsible for watching what is happening and acting appropriately.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am and is filed under Employee Engagement.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.