Stop blocking

This website has been created by a stalwart of the international PR community, Shel Holtz, to help battered, progressive managers argue and lobby for offering or maintaining employee access to social networking sites during office hours. He has said the site became necessary when self-serving companies who make money out of blocking access discovered the key to getting headlines. They simply do bad mathematics to exaggerate the cost of employee time spent on social network (usually a big number around the multi-billion-dollar mark) and the lazy, uncritical media swallow it whole and run with bold headlines designed to foment wowserism and neo-ludditism on talk shows and in boardrooms. You can see the latest stories on his site but tonight I want to share his main arguments in favour of granting access to employees, namely:

• Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so? Continue reading →