social medialising for a living!

I love Facebooking, tweeting IMing and all social media just like a lot of us. But enrolling on the course in new media for female jurnalists which is being offered by Famwz opened my eyes to a whole new world I thought I was too busy to engage in. So I started to do some research( though admittedly it wasn`t of my own volition, you can blame the facillitator of the course, Upenyu Makoni, for that!). I came across this article.  For those too lazy or too bored to follow the link, the long and short of the article is that that the CEO of a company called Domo instructed that every  employee get social - literally. He informed his employees that in order to keep their jobs the  employees needed to complete 20 social media and other online tasks over an eight-week period.
              The tasks ranged from updating their Facebook to reflect the new Timeline feature, creating three circles in Google+, creating a blog, creating a playlist on one of the music services, Pandora or Spotify and more.As a reward - in addition to keeping their jobs that is, the employees were given rewards for individuals who accomplish the goals and of the entire company meet its collective goals, everyone gets a free day off from work.
             At face value I  thought this was some sci fi loving geek gone bananas or just plainly, Horrible Bosses part 2. Upon further reflection I realised that this could be something that is worth looking at, especially for the media. Think about how may times celebs tweet or update their facebook profiles and you can see how much more information is out there. Being more social for journalists can actually increase the visibility of their brand as newpapers and media houses. If each and every employee of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation was on twitter, Facebok and other networking site, for example, tweeting about their programmes, news stories etc, think of the intrest that will be generated about said programmes. Each person would be linking to all their friends on Facebook and we can create a whole explosion of people following News fro Zbc, ( quite frankly few people DO open the zbc website, too boring)!
             So next time the boss moans and complains about how you are not working but just chatting with your friends on facebook in the newsroom bla bla , direct them to this link and let them see how beneficial social media really is.... for the company.....