Not surprisingly, lots of Zayo employees are on Facebook.  Like other companies, we keep a Zayo Group group site.  We don’t do much with it though.

I had a thought.  (Shocker, huh?)

Facebook (and other social media) threaten to cross the boundary between personal and professional lives.    Some people prefer to keep their personal lives private.   Others don’t.

I think Facebook is an ideal platform for letting employees learn about one another.   As such, I’d like to see all Zayo employees use Facebook and be part of a Zayo Group community.  However, I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to share personal information with co-workers. This creates a dilemma.   How do you strongly encourage employees to use Facebook and become members of a Zayo group without the employees feeling pressured to to expose personal lives to co-workers?

Here is my thought (it is simple, so expect to be underwhelmed):

1. Strongly encourage Zayo Group employees to open a Facebook account.  (But at the end of the day, it is up to each employee.  It won’t be counted against them if they choose not to join.)
2. However, make it crystal clear that the account need not be the same Facebook account they use for personal networking.
3. In their Zayo Group Facebook account, we would ask that the following info be populated:   name, photo, work location, job title, job description, and a little about your career background.     Any additional information is 100% optional.   Though it would be great to share interests, it is really up the individual.
4. We’d also ask that the Zayo Group Facebook account become a member of the Zayo Group community.
5. We’d do our best to only have current Zayo Group employees in the Zayo Group Facebook Community.
6. If an individual would like to use a dual personal/professional account, that is fine.   If at anytime, a different employee complains that something they consider inappropriate was in someone’s account, we’d remove the individual from the Zayo Group Community and encourage them to open up a separate Zayo Facebook account.

Thoughts?

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One of my readers sent me the following article in response to yesterday’s bearonbusiness post.  It illustrates how we need to be cautious with how we use the Internet to communicate about our companies.  I have likely inched over this line a few times myself as I have toyed with the blog.

Losing face

Nov 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

A tale of two airlines and their Facebook fiascos

Illustration by David Simonds

AS WELL as embracing blogs, firms have been exploiting social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to get their messages to a broader audience. But although they have the potential to be useful marketing tools, such networks can also be a source of damaging publicity, as British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic have discovered to their cost.

On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.

Some airline customers may not be fragrant paragons of exquisite taste, but attacking them online is a public-relations (PR) disaster that raises the question of whether the two firms have done enough to educate staff about acceptable use of the internet. BA says employees sign a policy that forbids them from posting information about the firm online without specific authorisation. But it clearly needs to do more to reinforce that message. Virgin points out that it has several internal channels through which staff can vent frustrations. But if these were effective, why would employees feel the need to moan on Facebook?

Communications specialists say the rise of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter make it all the more important to reiterate online guidelines frequently. “Anything you now say online is amplified by these services,” warns Aedhmar Hynes, the boss of Text 100, a PR firm.

Another lesson is that managers need to monitor online activity closely to ensure that rules are respected. Virgin discovered its employees’ posts only when enraged passengers complained. A spokesman for BA says it learnt about its Facebook problem from a press report. Phil Gomes of Edelman, another PR firm, urges companies to frequent what he calls “online watering holes” where people exchange gossip and views. Prevention is undoubtedly better than cure, but firms that spot problems early could end up with less egg on their faces.

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The past three days I wrote about Salesforce.com, Google Groups, and the Blogosphere.  I think the other essential tool will prove to be Facebook.  I know a whole ecosystem has sprung around Facebook and I have a sense that an advanced business should be tapping into Facebook.  Salesforce.com recently announced collaboration with Facebook.

I have not yet developed an intuition as to how Facebook can be leveraged by my companies.  This is something I hope to sort though in early 2009.  If you want to get ahead of me, figure this out and clue me in.

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I was at a friend’s house last week.  I was talking to a group of guys who were all in telecom.  They all read BearOnBusiness and one of them was so daring as to have written a few comments.  I asked them if they read Telecom Ramblings .

"What’s that?", they asked.

"It’s another telecom blog," I said with a tone of surprise.  If they read my blog, how could they not have discovered this?  Given how they like to banter about telecom, why wouldn’t they read this daily?   Silly me.  I assumed way too much.

"Where would we find it?" they asked.  I guess it was not much more than a year ago that I might have asked the same question, though the question left me perplexed.

"Look at my blogroll," I answered.  They responded with looks of confusion.

"Google Telecom Ramblings," I offered and they understood.  I added: "Then you can put it on your blog reader," which lost them.

Here is the point.  Do you want to get ahead at Zayo ?  Figure out what blogs you should read on a daily basis.   Get signed up with a reader–I use Google’s reader and recommend it.  Write comments on the various blogs so that you understand what it is like to be part of the blogosphere.  If you want to really be hot shit, guest post on Sandi’s blog , my blog, or on Envysion’s managedvideoblog.com .

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Yesterday’s post pertained to Salesforce.com and why I am driving Zayo to fully embrace it.  I suggested that getting ahead at Zayo is linked to mastery of Salesforce.com.  While I am on the topic, Google Groups is another tool that I want to see Zayo employees master.  Why?

1. It is a powerful tool for organizing work, collaborating with others, and sharing information.
2. Anyone who can build and maintain a great Google Groups site is demonstrating mastery of Internet that is advanced relative to most of their peers.  This is pathetically untrue if you are in a Web 2.0 company, but is unfortunately true if you are in an average telecom company.  Since I don’t want Zayo to be average, I expect that our people will develop this skill set.
3. It gives me visibility into how people are organizing and pursuing their work.   people who want to get ahead should use Google Groups to gain visibility and support for what they are doing.

Are you a Zayo employee?  Do you want to get ahead?  Are you able and willing to learn Google Groups?   If you haven’t used it, the hardest part will be figuring out what it even is.  Until you play around with it, you probably will not be able to understand how it can help you do your job.  If you want to learn it but aren’t sure how to get started, send me a note and I will get someone to help you get started.

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Rob Powell of Telecom Rambling’s fame led me to a thorough article on “How the Internet works“.  The article was written by Rudolph van der Berg in ars technica.  Rudolph–thank you for making this available.

At the end of the article is a link to another white paper “The Art of Peering“.

Zayo Team:  I encourage you to print these out and read them.   It is hard to find thorough material that helps people connect the dots on the inner-workings of the Internet.

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If it works for Berkshire…