Recently I was at a dinner with a group of visiting European businessmen and my wife commented about the gaming habits of some friends she had connected with on Facebook.
After she mentioned a particular name, one of the guests, who sitting right in front of us, because green in the face and realized that one of his key employees was actually spending substantial production time playing on his computer.
The name of the "suspect" was so unique that there was no mistake about him and then we because absolute certain of his identity when my wife mentioned some additional information about this guy.
The funny thing about it is that this very person, who lives and works in Europe, had been complaining with his boss about how much he had to do and how he was not being able to keep the pace with all the requirements that his boss was sending from the US.
A very funny situation and we had a very good laugh, but our guest had suddenly come to see another aspect of social media power.
He had not been familiar with Facebook until few months ago and he had never thought of connecting his own staff to himself: in the end he knew them already and had other communication channels already with them.
But now he was going to connect with just everybody in his office and was going to keep an eye on everybody's activity.
I believe it is kind of embarrassing to have someone else come to you and inform you, accidentally, about something going on you your company, but with social media the information is really shared on a wide scale and you learn much more about people by looking up their accounts and their activities than by just talking with them and sharing the same working space for years.
I have been living this experience myself in the last couple of days.
I had hired a virtual assistant, somebody helping me on my business activities from a distance.
We had a full time agreement, that is he was supposed to work for me all the time and he had given him a list of things to do at the beginning of the week, yet I had seen little results.
He was moving slow and it took him two days to do an action that can be performed in half an hour.
He told me he had technical problems to work out, but then I caught him sending out messages on Facebook about products that had nothing to do with my business.
I realized immediately that he had started working for somebody else and that was why he couldn't complete my task list on time.
I confronted with him and proposed him to get paid half, but when he complained loudly about the unfairness of my request, I knew I had hit pay dirt and it was time to end our relationship.
By using Facebook, in just few minutes, I was able to spot a problem very early and act on it immediately.
I am not advocating the use of social media for controlling others, but social media has become so much part of many people life that you can use it to establish the true character and intentions of people even if they live in another continent and act accordingly.
When people do something wrong they often want to be discovered and social media is the new channel that many individuals use to make their public "confessions".
Roberto Mazzoni