Social Policing

February 7, 2009 at 1:02 pm · Filed under Business Ideas, Enterprise Tale, Thoughts

Sometime back I came across this article in Economist. Here is a paragraph from it.

“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.”

While talking to a friend, I was telling him a possibility of Social Policing. With several hundred online social networks around, with several million working professionals, there is a high chance of one “uttering” something not meant to be. The concept goes like this.

With growing web presence employees are constantly doing something or the other on the internet. There should be a service, which enterprises will subscribe for its employees and they will give the details (login ids) of the employees.
This service shall “listen” at these places and raise an alarm if it finds any improper information posted by the employees of the company.

It is similar to the way bank accounts/ trading accounts are monitored if one is working at a financial firm. So will the web accounts should also be monitored. Thus when an employee joins a company, he puts in all his details like address, social security details etc. He will also share his user name for Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc.

 The HR passes the info to this service and the monitoring starts and gets reported to the HR team. Any violation of the company policy is tracked and gets noticed by the HR before any media gets to know about it and creates any embarrasing situation about the company.
One question my friend had during our conversation is what happens if this employee is talking anonymously. That is anyways not the scope of this idea. I mean as soon as someone talks in anonymity, the authentication about the talk drop down. Secondly, there is no legal binding on  a company and cannot be dragged into courts,  if an employee is doing something anonymously.
So what do you think?

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1 Comment »

  1. Ideas, Rule » Social Policing 2 said,

    February 11, 2009 @ 6:32 pm

    [...] my last post I wrote about how there should be some kind of monitoring service. One of my friends critiqued me that this [...]

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