Your boss wants you on Twitter

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Your employer may soon want to muscle in on your Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

Social networking sites help workers connect with family and friends, and they’re great tools for building networks and creating your personal brand. Now a growing number of companies want in on the act, and they want you to help.

Company officials at Symantec Corp., makers of Norton anti-virus software, recently started encouraging workers to “advocate for the company” on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, says Cory Edwards, social media strategist for the company.

Marian Merritt, the company’s Internet Security Advocate, intermingles personal and work-related tweets on her Twitter account: “Landed at LAX. Gals behind me didnt stop yakking (LOUDLY) for ten hrs.” and “Does your school group want FREE Family Online Safety brochures from Norton?”

At eBillme, many sales people use LinkedIn to connect with clients. The company has fan pages on Facebook, and workers from all departments are offered training on how to use social networking sites to spread company information, says Samer Forzley, vice president of marketing for the online ecommerce payment provider. “If they’re tweeting, or have friends they trust on Facebook, it’s okay to once and a while say ‘we have discounts,’ ” he says.

Even the Phoenix Suns’ mascot — “The Gorilla” — is tweeting for his basketball team these days, giving former Suns player and veteran Twitter aficionado Shaquille O’Neal a run for his money.

A recent Gorilla tweet: “I think my friend Rumble the Bison (Oklahoma City Thunder) and I should have a drum off, what do you guys think? Maybe even a Dunk off!?”

Personal vs. professional
Companies see the value in social networking sites as a way to promote their products and services without dishing out big bucks for traditional marketing. Most commonly, organizations set up corporate-branded accounts that are in some ways nameless entities on sites like Facebook and Twitter, said Nate Elliott, principle analyst for Forrester Research. But with so many of their employees already using these sites for personal use, he added, employers are looking to see how they can leverage their reach.

“It’s a really fine line,” says Elliott. “You don’t want to astro turf, create fake grass roots, and you don’t want to command your employees to use personal networks to promote the company.”

Indeed, employees need to tread lightly when they start using their contacts and friends from LinkedIn or Facebook for work purposes. If you leave your job, for example, it’s unclear if those connections belong to you or your employer, labor law experts say. Before the social networking explosion, if an employee had a list of contacts at work established for the sake of generating business or marketing, courts often decided workers had no right to those lists when they left their jobs.

“This is going to be interesting,” says Patricia Abril, assistant professor of business law, School of Business Administration at the University of Miami, about how laws will adapt to this latest Internet machination. “I think what’s at the core of this is a blurring of social and professional. Before it was a lot easier to establish when you were wearing your work hat and when you weren’t.”

There is little if any case law in the United States regarding this issue, but Abril pointed to a United Kingdom case that found in the employer’s favor. A longtime employee of Hays, a London recruiting firm, had been encouraged by his employer to use LinkedIn for his work, but when he left, his former managers accused him of stealing those contacts.

Although laws are different in the United States, Abril says the case is a precursor to the legal battles we may see playing out in American workplaces in the near future as more employees are asked to use social media as part of their jobs.

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