To very different posts today.
Marc says Facebook is a timewaster and should be banned inside a workplace. He reasons that the time that could be spent Faceboking should be used on high value networking, Salesforce mining etc.
Nick says that Facebook, Myspace et al are valuable disseminators of information in the informal sphere of a business’ operations. That it helps communication in ways that the traditional methods, stuck to the traditional organization chart, cannot.
My perspective tends towards Nick’s more than Marc’s. Times are changing and the very basis of the organisation as we know it today is changing. The new paradigm will, to a certain extent, be formed by, and will form these very new ways of comunicating, collaborating and co-operating.
For that reason alone these services have value and we should be encouraging our people to use, know, understand, develop and be developed by, them all.
It’s a great topic this one
Just so my position is a little clearer. Social tools are already pervading business but Nick missed this a little I think e.g. Linkedin, Salesforce, Wiki’s amongst others. It’s a good read though. I wouldn’t want 100 people in a Telstra call centre running on tight margins spending their time content creating in Facebook. Would Rod want his staff spending an hour a day creating/reading and updating Facebook instead of doing the same on his code base? I can see arguments for it in Social Media marketing roles or product review roles for people in our industry. So I ask myself what’s the best use of human capital and what’s the best tool for the given situation? Facebook isn’t my capital driven answer 