Does social media stop people from working?

Bizarrely it is the mobile phone – a device originally used for talking to each other that has contributed to the popularity of social networking. You can’t go to the cinema, theatre or pub these days without noticing the incessant finger tapping of people who would clearly prefer to comment on life rather than engage with it.

If you talk to any call centre manager they will tell you that the elicit use of mobile phones and the internet are seriously effecting their call handling stats. In fact, I see more company policies restricting the use of the internet and social media than I do encouraging it; and with so much communication and lack of editing controls it is difficult to see how social media can actually enhance the workplace.

The business context

Various studies have shown that in the business context social media tools do not work as they are.  For most people there is a very clear differentiation between what we consider to be social and business interactions and attempts to mix the two will fail.

Collaborative media tools on the other hand are vitally important to businesses, however it’s important to note that collaborative media is a ‘buy from’ rather than a ‘sell to’ mechanism.  That is to say that the emphasis is on the reader to opt-in which is where so many organisations have got it wrong.  Encouraging people to read and comment on a blog that is a piece of blatant sales literature is frankly annoying and yet another version of spam.  Whereas asking subject matter experts within an organisation to blog about their given subject could prove to be a useful training aid and an excellent source of best practice.

I recently attended an exhibition in San Francisco where plasma screens had been erected all around the hall to show the tweets of people attending the show.  This proved to be a surprisingly useful mechanism as people would post tweets about things they had seen and whether they were worth looking at.  It occurred to me that delegates attending seminars or training courses could tweet to colleagues about the various speakers and activities – providing valuable feedback to organisers as well as creating a digest of their key learning points.

Although I would urge caution for any organisation considering developing their own Wiki, I recently met with a company who use their Wiki tool for technical acronyms and terminology pertinent to their particular work practices and culture.  This site was tightly controlled and moderated, but still provided a useful repository for employees across the globe that could easily be expanded to include processes and templates.

While most organisations limit the use of social networking sites such as Facebook, understanding the collaborative nature of this particular medium certainly poses interesting applications within an organisation.  Having similar tools, within the control of your organisation, that have the ability to allow people to create a community of practice amongst those working on similar issues – such as sales teams, production staff or technical teams promotes a culture of collaborative working.  It also encourages peer support – remember this medium allows for global interaction and could sow useful seeds for future cooperation between territories.

Ultimately people need to communicate and the rise in popularity of collaborative media tools is undeniable, but for me, the trick is to understand how and why people use them and capture those fundamentals in creative workplace scenarios to gain the best results.

In next week’s e-shot we’ll be returning to this subject to look at how and why using the conventions of online collaboration spaces can work and aid productivity, knowledge sharing and learning.