Five Reasons You Shouldn't Ask for Employees' Facebook Passwords

So, employers think this is smart?

A teacher’s aide in Michigan was let go from her job after a school administrator demanded that she turn over her Facebook password and she refused. The aide, Kimberly Hester, is preparing for a legal showdown with the school system. (Read the full story at Time's Moneyland)

Wrong . . . this is simply daft in so many ways. Yet it is popping up more frequently.

Here are five good reasons to think twice before you tread on the private lives of your employees:

• #1 Other employees will disdain not only your authoritarianism and disrespect for privacy but also your evident lack of understanding about how social networks work

• #2 You will inevitably face the kind of social web backlash that attends any maneuver to control personal online behaviour

• #3 Your actions will make it impossible in the future to claim with any credibility that you are committed to "employee engagement", "openness", "transparency" and any other popular business tropes
• #4 Your kids, for whom social networks are central to their lives, will think you're a dork.
• #5 You will be giving succor to governments which want to "extend the state's investigatory powers" in dangerous and unnecessary ways

So don't do it: You've got so little to gain in terms of advocating employee self-discipline and so much to lose in terms of respect.

Zuckerberg: Facebook is about a social mission

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected."

If it wasn't for an email from the global chairman of H+K Strategies, Jack Martin, I would not have thought to read Mark Zuckerberg's letter to accompany Facebook's Form S-1 Registration Statement for its IPO this week. (How many people read these SEC filings and prospectuses anyway?) But there's some great stuff in it that could almost comprise a manifesto for the social web. One idea in particular stands out:

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness . . . At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

In other words, the social web is about the relationships it can intermediate. Anyone who has heard me speak about the social web will know that understanding this concept is critical to getting any social engagement strategy right, whether for a non-profit or for-profit enterprise. It's why I prefer the term 'social web' to 'social media', the latter implying as it does that social platforms exist for broadcast purposes.

I'm not naive enough to think that the letter's altruism drives every one of Facebook's business decisions. But this sense of a social purpose does peak through in the entrepreneurial spirit of social web inventors.