Time has passed and you’ve made your peace with Facebook only for yet another social media networking tool to hit the market. This one’s called Twitter and it has been around for a while. It has reached the point of popular adoption, with a growth rate of over 1,382% between February 2008 – February 2009.

This time, it’s not really about your friends but rather the act of ‘following’ people, some of whom you have met but the majority of which who are industry thought leaders, celebrities or quite simply complete strangers. So, you ‘follow’ these people and in the interim read their 140 character messages that appear in real-time, whilst sharing your own 140 character tips, thoughts, news, gems of wisdom, arbitrary daily occurrences, personal schedule, interesting links, emotions, traffic reports, industry events etc. all in the hope that someone will ‘follow’ you. Again, ‘less is more’ is not a common mantra seen on Twitter. One of the goals appears to be to collect ‘followers’ and if you’re Ashton Kutcher, once you reach a million followers, Oprah will cover the story. So, as you can see, this ‘followers’ thing is a pretty big deal.

So, do you really need to be on Twitter?

It’s All Relative

If you work for Zappos, Twitter is fairly paramount, given CEO Tony Hsieh has revolutionised the manner in which a CEO of a prominent online company interacts with his audience.

On the other hand, if you work in a specialised field, for example as a geophysicist, the networking circle is so narrow that online interaction itself is scarce and beyond this, the highly technical nature of the field, including the jargon-loaded terminology does not lend itself to a social networking environment. Allow me to demonstrate a potential Tweet:

“Made progress on p-wave anisotropic measurements of the Cascadian subduction zone at the transition from the lithosphere to the astenosphere”

Moving right along.

The line becomes a little bit blurry when in a position of dependence, for example the job hunt. It is difficult to ascertain how the hiring company shall perceive the use of Twitter by the potential candidate. This, at the commencement of the recruiting process will depend entirely on the HR Director. If interested in social media networking, a candidate’s presence on Twitter may be an unwritten prerequisite in successfully proceeding to the next stage of the hiring process. However, if the HR Director falls into a more traditional realm in which social media remains a subject that is being tentatively explored, then an active Twitter profile may go unrecognised.

On a side note, if you are in job hunt mode, and are looking to secure a position that in some form or manner involves an understanding of the online marketing industry, you should utilise the social media platforms that are causing a stir in the online market – Twitter being one of them.

If the words ‘social media’ fall anywhere in your job title, it would be advisable to Tweet and perhaps write something insightful for your clients, rather than just sharing news on the shoes you purchased or the restaurant you are currently frequenting – unless your clients are supposed to meet you there!

So, if you think that Twitter is just pointless babble and have no desire to join the noise, do not feel pressured to do so. Having said that, it is difficult to derive value from something that you have not yet tried yourself, so before making any hasty conclusions, the only way to answer ‘To Tweet or not to Tweet?’ is to jump on and give it a shot. Unless you’re a geophysicist, of course.

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Back in the day, prior to social media and the ability to tell countless millions of people how we feel about our day, or the fact that our dog is sick, or how we hate working late, we would let off steam at a private face-to-face rendezvous with a close friend. But, how narcissistic we are, how we love to share our thoughts with others in order to receive sympathy or encouragement. We are ‘till the end, social creatures, for better or for worse.

So, when we have that irrepressible urge to tell our boss how much we hate our job or publicly call him a ‘wanker’, it would serve us well to remember whether we added him as a Facebook friend or not!

What to do? What to do?

Most interview tips will clearly state NOT to bad mouth your employer, former or current, in any way whatsoever. So, why do we think it is okay to do it when holding down a position with the current employer?

So, here are a few options to review when that unmistakable urge hits you to slander your boss on ANY social media platform:

1. Think – before you post anything ludicrous, potentially damaging to your own reputation or someone else’s think about the potential consequences.

Remember that this is in fact the Internet and the information is readily available to everyone, it is not just your private broadcasting centre set up for you to vent your daily frustrations.

If you can help yourself, don’t do it! Smash a glass against the wall instead! Though messy, it will not be nearly as messy as being fired for saying something so damaging the consequence of which could only be losing your job.

2. Do not be ‘friends’ with your boss – there’s LinkedIn which has been specifically designed to further professional relationships and then there’s Facebook – the audience and the interaction vary significantly.

Do not mix your personal life and your business life too extensively. Know where to draw the line. We seem to have moved into a new era in which there almost is no line between personal and professional, which can be a problem if you forget that your boss is in fact your boss, and not just that really cool guy that can take a joke.

3. If you have to be friends, be ‘Limited Profile’ friends – if you absolutely have to accept your employer’s invitation to be friends on Facebook, there are options to limit how much of your profile can be viewed. Investigate the security and profile settings on your social media platforms! Facebook in particular offers a number of options from limited profiles to outright blocking people so that as far as they are concerned, on Facebook, you do not exist.

There are options, you simply have to take some control over your social media accounts. Do not simply adhere to all the default settings because they may simply not be in your best interests.

What follows is a step-by-step account of how to either block someone or give them a limited view of your Facebook account:

Scroll over the Settings tab,
next to your Log out button

and select Privacy Settings

On the next page that appears, you will see the first jewel – the ability to block people. In a nutshell, by blocking someone, you no longer exist to them on Facebook, nor do they exist to you. This extends as far as not being able to find that person in a Facebook search. Anyone with an –ex could fit well in this category, ex-boyfriends, ex-friends, anyone who has little business knowing the details of your personal life.

From the same page, you can tweak the privacy settings under these titles:

Profile

This is where you control who can see things such as your personal details or photos tagged of you, your status updates and links etc. If you wish to create limited profiles, simply click on Customise in the drop down menu and from there you can limit who sees your specific profile information.
Search
This section is more important than you think. Not only do you control who can search for your name on Facebook but you can also opt out of the Public Search Listing which controls whether your Facebook profile is searchable in the search engine results.

If you do not want employers to use Facebook to measure your compatibility with company culture, do not make your Facebook page easy to find, particulary in search engine query searches.

News Feed and Wall
This controls which Facebook actions others can see – if you do not wish to advertise all your Facebook activities such as adding a friend, writing a wall post or changing your relationship status – this is where you would tweak this visibility.

Applications
If you find yourself frequently using applications on Facebook, it would be worthwhile reviewing the privacy settings to see exactly how much personal information an application can view. Of course, the default will be that the application can access all your information, so you have to manually restrict this by logging into the privacy settings.

Take control of your Facebook privacy settings with the same zest with which you proclaim your daily sentiments in your status updates. This small endeavour may save you from consequences that would have you grumbling about your current jobless status in what would still officially be termed a recession.

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If a company has a high turnover rate, this has serious implications for both the client as well as the team that remains and constantly has to absorb employees leaving and new members coming on board.

SEO Team Dropping Like Flies?
The SEO industry is in a unique position in this worldwide recession. In many parts of the world, SEO services are in very high demand, competition is rife and SEO businesses continue to spring up. (Perhaps not at the rate of mushrooms like in the social media industry, but growth remains).

This means that if staff is not happy in their current company, leaving, may still be an option, unlike in many other industries in which people are clinging to their jobs. In SEO the hours are long, the work can be thankless and self-appointed directors, hungry for growth in their personal enterprise can be relentless and unforgiving.

So in an industry in which employees still have options, one could say there is a close correlation between job satisfaction and the decision to leave. It could almost be described as an inversely proportional relationship, in that the lower one’s job satisfaction, the higher the propensity to leave.

Constantly losing employees and gaining new team members is a very high cost activity because the business constantly needs to recruit and then cover the learning, lower productivity and risk costs of the new employees. There is simply no way that a new employee can match the productivity of the existing team and in turn, the new member weighs down on the team because they must teach the new player the ropes.

A Domino Effect
Even though in-house, losing team members has a profound effect on workload and team morale, from a value perspective it is the client who feels the strain of this loss most keenly. If an account manager or first point of contact is leaving the company, this creates a great deal of work and frustration for the client.

With a new account manager a relationship needs to be developed, the project rediscussed in detail and more focus & energy reallocated to something that may have been running smoothly for months.

All those things that just ‘clicked’ and worked with the previous account manager are in the past. In many ways it is like starting from square one with the agency, and for some clients it may be drastic enough to change SEO companies – particularly if things had not been going that well!

Big Shoes to Fill
Sometimes when people leave a company, they also leave big shoes to fill. The first point of contact on any project is the key link between the in-house team and the client.

It is very easy for the director or business development manager to make all kinds of promises to the client, but it is the operational team, who handle the daily ins and outs of the project that will differentiate one agency from another.

The truth is, people expect to be swept off their feet by the business development manager. Through a combination of rapport, client business understanding and a solid business proposal, clients quickly sift through the list to come down to their top picks. The real clincher and indicator of agency professionalism is how the project takes off once the SEO company has taken the client’s money.

You cannot have a solid agency with a well-orchestrated team if it has a staff turnover rate akin to the hospitality industry. It is simply not possible to meet client objectives when those objectives become increasingly diluted via a constant knowledge transferral to new account managers. The client objectives start to sound like a bad game of ‘broken telephone’.

Furthermore, newly appointed account managers may be less experienced and possess a poorer business acumen to correctly interpret your company’s vision and goals. If this is the case or the handover process was not properly implemented, this may create knowledge gaps that will ultimately affect the quality and implementation of the project.

If you are thinking of working with an SEO agency, ask them about their staff turnover rate before considering their services. This may save you hours of frustration and unnecessarily dancing on thin ice as you constantly have to explain company objectives and project goals to new account managers who may just not get it; and fall through the cracks!

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