IF you are a boss, the next time you catch one of your staff members on Facebook, don't be too brutal with them because it is actually not bad for your business.

That is, unless, your employees use the social marketing tool merely for catching up with long lost friends and chatting with relatives in the Diaspora about the situation back home. That would certainly qualify as gross abuse of office time.

But Facebook and business do actually mix.

Initially, Facebook was created as a tool for students attending Harvard University to keep track of one another. It was founded in 2004 by former Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and later grew to allow even more educational institutions to be able to access the tool. In 2005, "thefacebook" was officially launched as Facebook. In 2006, it was made freely accessible to those who were not members of educational institutions -- that is, the global public.

And so what started as a simple university campus project has since sprouted to become one of the biggest global social networking forums. Regardless of nationality and bandwidth allowances, almost everyone is using Facebook to stay in touch.

And today, millions of people around the world log on to Facebook to share news and information.

So how does Facebook help your business?

Well, if many of your business contacts are registered users on Facebook, keeping in touch with them is much easier.

With Facebook, you don't need to know email addresses or any other contact details. Once both you and the other user have confirmed each other as friends on Facebook, you gain easy access to one another -- which means that you can compose and send mail which the other person will be notified of via their usual email address, or which they will see upon logging on to their Facebook account. This saves time.

Facebook also helps you to get back in touch with important contacts whom you might have lost track of. All you have to do is conduct a search by simply typing in the name of your contact.

Facebook then aggregates all of its members that have the same name, or a similar name. Once you have found the right person, you send them a friend request, which is a formal request for that person to become your friend on Facebook.

If that person accepts your friend request, you are able to see their details and information, and vice versa.

But even more important on Facebook, members can create groups.

If you want to, you can create a group for your organisation, company, advocacy campaign or cause. When creating the group, you can give some information about it so that users on Facebook know whether or not they would like to join it.

So how, you might ask, will people find out about your group.

For me, this is where the social aspect of Facebook becomes evident. If I join a group which a friend tells me about on Facebook, a notice will appear on my Facebook homepage -- which is visible to all of my friends. If one of my friends sees this notice and is interested, they can also join the group.

And this information will be visible to all of that person's friends, who can then also join the group. So, a friend of a friend of a friend can find out something new just by the web of associations that Facebook allows.

I think that it is a low-cost, efficient way of disseminating information.

If a person joins a group, they will always receive notices of new information that the group might have posted. For instance, many Zimbabweans, and those around the world, joined a Facebook group called "Free Jestina" in solidarity with the imprisoned human rights activist, Jestina Mukoko. And through this group, they received regular updates on her trial status, as well as any events being held in solidarity with her plight.

A fourth point, commercial and non-commercial entities are fast realising the potential that Facebook has to boost their profiles with the public. Just visit popular websites like BBC or the South African Mail and Guardian and scroll down some of the pages on offer.

What in effect you, as the Facebook user, do is stimulate traffic on that website. And this is what any company or organisation with a website would like.

But the utility of Facebook presupposes reliable and constant access to the Internet -- something which is not uniform throughout Zimbabwe. And because of this, this social tool tends to skip a large portion of its key targets.

However, for those with regular access to the Internet, Facebook is well worth considering as a tool for effective marketing and communication.

And rather than ban employees from using it, think of innovative ways of how they can use it to spread your cause to their many friends around the world, who can then spread the message on to even more people.

You may call Facebook a waste of time. And I do agree but I am optimistic about Facebook and like to think of it as the spark that has the potential to start a good warm fire of information dissemination in our nation.