Twenty-Somethings, First Jobs and the Social Web. Can a Balance Be Achieved?

Jared Watts seems like a pretty typical guy my age. He’s got his first job out of college working at a Cingular store. His dad–who is senior vice president and associate general counsel of Cingular’s parent company, AT&T–helped him get his foot in the door. He’s got a blog on LiveJournal and a profile on Facebook.

The problem is that Jared blogs pretty regularly about how much he hates his job, his customers, and his manager. The Washington Post recently did an article about how the online behavior of newsmakers’ offspring can embarrass their prominent parents. Jared’s father told the Post through a company spokesperson that, “I care very much for my son. And like many fathers and sons, we have differences of opinion on many subjects.”

Elana Centor at Funny Business thinks that Cingular could, if they chose to listen, learn a great deal about employee satisfaction from reading Watts’ blog. I agree that they could learn a great deal, but I think that Watts should still be reprimanded for his unprofessional behavior, no matter how powerful his father is.

This incident further illustrates the need for companies to have policies laying out what is appropriate and what is inappropriate when it comes to employees discussing work online in their free time. If such a policy were in place at Cingular, then this unfortunate and unprofessional incident might never have occurred.

One of Centor’s observations stuck me as incredibly prescient. She wrote, “Jared says what he wants to whomever he wants. His dad opts for the company spokesperson. Talk about a generation gap.” It’s absolutely true that there is a major generation gap when it comes to making personal information–be it images of ourselves kicking back with a drink or gripes about work–public. I posted recently about these issues with regard to social networking.

I maintain that it’s not necessarily bad that my generation likes to put ourselves out there on the Web. It’s a cultural difference that our parents’ generation needs to respect. We have the right to share our personal thoughts and pictures with the world if we want to. But in order to earn that respect, we must collectively grow some maturity and judgment about where we draw the line–especially when it comes to work. I rarely blog about my job on my personal blog, and when I do I usually talk genuinely about how much I love what I do. If I have issues with my job, I talk to my boss directly and professionally. That’s just common sense.

Jared Watts grew that common sense the hard way. It was only after having his complaints about work splashed all over the Post that he made his blog “friends only,” which means that only the people he knows and trusts through LiveJournal can read his blog.

UPDATE 11/1/06 11:03 a.m. Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog has a great post about law students and MySpace.