Here at Pure Visibility, blog authors have a rotating schedule. Last week, I wrote a commissioned article per request of a co-founder; upon publishing time, I found myself hesitating.

Hoping that any potentially offensive reading would be lost in translation, I asked a co-worker, “Think I could publish my blog post as administrator?”
His puzzled look told me he didn’t quite see what I was getting at. “Sure, but …?”
My awkward attempt at explaining that the post was not congruent with my (entirely self-perceived) blog reputation followed. My blog screename, containing my last name, had inspired a minor narcissistic crisis.

This anecdote is brought to mind by the MIMA Summit’s recent call to bloggers for responses to a list of questions in preparation for upcoming event. The question: “The influx of people using social networking on and off the job has led to an always on, casual online environment. Have you adapted you customer service model to respond? Who has a public voice in your company? What are they saying?”

First off, to unpack a rather vague query. Possible interpretations of this question read:

• Have you instituted a policy to handle online customer service communications during non-work hours?
• Do you have a profile on X representing your company? (where X is any number of social networks)
• Do you have a policy to handle communication from customers/potential leads who initiate contact thru X?
• Do you monitor the public online activity of your employees in non-work hours?

To answer the questions posed directly, around here, everyone has a public voice via this blog. Is that a good thing? Yes and no, I imagine. We are also a small company though, and until we have the resources to specialize enough to have a full time writer, it will have to do. What are they (the public voice of the company) saying? Nothing shocking, obviously, seeing as rules have not yet been put in place to monitor this. We have a few profiles on social networks, but again, the rules dictating their use are not so strict, if existent.

In a company where communication is good and/or employee motivations are aligned with company ideals, what the public voice of the company says should not differ from what any one else would say if given the choice. As social networks and off-hours online interactions pose a potential threat to the company’s unified front, companies might spend more efforts not on policing behavior but rather on aligning beliefs.

More interesting than the straightforward answers to this question are the forces that inspire it in the first place. What is it that has changed in the last 20 years, causing employees who may have avoided all thought of work after hours in the past to feel so compelled to answer, say, the stray business-related emails that trickle in on the weekend?

A big part of the change is no doubt related to our changing perceptions of the office space. Phone and computer were once two different mediums, and both grounded firmly in a physical office for most people. Today, the two have united for many businesses, with a large portion of work communications occurring online, and the environment that serves as conduit being portable and ubiquitous. It takes far more self-control now (for some of us at least) not to work during off-hours. Here at Pure Visibility, for example, we work on Mac laptops that we tote home with us (most of us) and use as our primary computers both for work and personal business. On the weekend and every evening, I fire up my computer to check on something non-work related, but am confronted with the files I saved to my desktop before leaving work, or I login to my email and am confronted with work emails, which have been forwarded from my work address. To constantly be switching from promptly answering communications and tackling tasks required during the workday to exerting the will power to keep myself from answering them, all within an environment (desktop picture, etc) that my eyes see and my mind perceives as being exactly the same, is difficult to say the least.

As environments become conflated, so do identities. “I am no longer just Mike outside of work, I am Mike from Pure Visibility” says a co-worker, describing a situation that is the perfect converse of the blog crisis above. The record left by online social networking means we are always representing the company.

“La perruque” is the french term for personal business done on company time, which no doubt spiked upon the embracing of the internet in many an organization. Michel de Certeau writes in his book “The Practice of Everyday Life” that la perruque is a tactic used by the masses to subtly resist the powers that be. The real question is, What is the french word for the opposite, the subtle influence on employee identities exerted by the business, even the off hours?