How good to see a “major think tank” so up-to-date with thinking….! According to Demos “Bosses should embrace Facebook“. Apparently, says Demos, it could be counter productive to stop staff using Facebook.

Now, forgive me a moment while I blow my own trumpet – but isn’t that exactly what I said when I wrote about Facebook bans over six months ago…!

Interesting too, that the Demos web site doesn’t feature the Facebook research it has carried out. Also, the sponsors of the study, Orange, make the amazing statement that “social networking is increasing now, because of the proliferation of new technologies that enable us to connect to each other in our personal and professional lives”. Er…wasn’t the very technology that Orange promotes (the phone) invented more than 100 years ago? And isn’t it used for social networking?

This is a classic example of a big company being “taken over” by the hype surrounding a supposedly new technology. Let’s get this right – social networking has been around since humans first started walking on the face of the planet. All that the likes of Facebook do is enable us to carry on doing that in new and exciting ways. Too many people are falling into the trap of thinking that social networking online is something new or different; it isn’t. It’s what we’ve always done and that’s why it is so successful. And that’s why you (and Orange) can’t afford to ignore it.