The New York Times always has a few interesting tech pieces, and Jennifer 8 Lee has her share of them. And, this recent article, A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date is some great positioning and a great hit for RIM and its Blackberry products. But, while reading the article, one thought was running through my mind: what are these people thinking?!
We have all read stories of people being fired for using work emails for person fun - or work time for blogging or using work computers for who only knows. So, well, this is easy to figure out who is using their work hardware and software for personal reasons - and we'll know who will be fired on Monday morning.
I really couldn't believe that these people were readily interviewed by the NYT - it was like a big sign saying "yep, using my work Blackberry to try to hook up with others."
One of the first things I learned when I started in public relations was that work email is for work, and if you want to send out a personal email, you use Hotmail or Yahoo - remember, this is when those two services started out. Even though I'm the president/founder of POP! Public Relations, I still use my Hotmail account for my personal emails.
Or, if you are going to use work time for personal stuff, at least hide it better and don't broadcast it in a national newspaper....
Thoughts on "communications, marketing, public relations and social media."
I've never thought to even consider not using work email for personal use. It seemed generally accepted that it's not a problem, and not a concern. It used to be common practice that people posting on newsgroups or on web pages would list their work email address.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I've worked in the corporate environment, the only rule was: don't do anything illegal. Other than that, you would have sounded stupid if you said something about not using your work email address.