I guess the term has been circulating for a little while now, but a Frolleague is a colleague who sends a friendship request. I guess LinkedIn is not happy about the crossover of friends and professional relationships on their network. Here’s a bit of the article I found:
LinkedIn claimed 47% of the UK’s web users are mixing their social and professional lives by accepting networking invitations from “frolleagues” – colleagues who send friendship requests…A survey conducted by the site found that 36% of workers feel an obligation to accept friend requests from colleagues, although 73% said they wanted to keep them separate.
Users need to be prepared to turn down requests from colleagues, must carefully consider the personal information they post online, and should explore and utilise the privacy settings on networking sites so that only trusted friends can access their profiles, according to LinkedIn.
If this is considered a problem in the UK, what is the situation here in the States?
First, I think it’s a false number anyway. LinkedIn (the free version cause I don’t have a need to pay for it), provides 5 or 6 ways that you can be connected with someone. I’ve found myself choosing “Friend” because there wasn’t another way to categorize the relationship. They may not be a Colleague because the darned system FORCES you to choose a company that you have listed on the profile. Well, that’s just plain DUMB.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have every affiliation I’ve ever participated in on my profile.
How about an open ended, limited text length, option for those contacts that don’t match the options presented? What an idea.
I like LinkedIn, but now that I’m familiarizing myself with other social media networks, it’s pretty boring. I do like the new Groups feature, that does add some sizzle. I don’t like that I have some connections here, and over there, and back over somewhere else. And, not all contacts translate over. For example, I’m not sure I’d follow everyone on my LinkedIn list on Twitter.
I’m trying to sort out all this social media stuff and I’ll be writing an article series on it starting with Telesian’s next enews. Stay tuned.
Back to LinkedIn – It will be interesting to see where this applications end up. I see collaborative partnerships on the horizon for all these guys. They all need to figure out how to play nice with each other so it doesn’t take me 15 minutes to make an brief, interesting twitter post that references this blog article (also requiring unqiue connection), and includes a tiny URL to discuss LinkedIn.
Sheesh.
