Wednesday 4 June 2008

Revisiting the Corporate side of Facebook

The world, as we know, is divided into those the 'Get' social networking and those that Don't. I have found that many 'Don't Get it" people are as fanatically biased against it as any other bigots I have come across.

A year ago I wrote an article on HotViews - The Corporate side of Facebook - which featured, amongst other examples of corporate use, how Ernst & Young in the US had been using Facebook to attract graduates. I actually got quite a lot of feedback to this story - almost all of the "it will never work" or "it's just a gimmick" type.

So I was both interested, and not a little pleased, to read the annual survey of 43,000 US undergrads by pollster Universum (USA) as reported in Businessweek 9th June 08. Amazingly, Ernst & Young had shot up from the 12th ranked 'ideal' employer in the US (Google is #1) in 2007 to 4th in 2008 (Google is still #1). This was the sharpest rise in the history of this poll and "its web-based recruiting - particularly Facebook" was cited by the pollsters as the reason.

As Generation M hit University (which they are now doing), any employer who doesn't embrace social networking, not only in their recruiting but in their general "way of working", is going to be at a serious disadvantage. You have, as they say, been warned!

1 comment:

Richard Hyett said...

I'm still having problems appreciating Facebook and Twitter as well, every couple of months I spend some time on them, but never seem to get much back. Ideas that excite me, setting up a youtube type video resource intranet for a company, say Ernst and Young, where each employee has to make a weekly video about what they are thinking/doing, haven't Cisco done this already? Co-working as a movement is also a very exciting prospect could it be the next big thing?