Social Media is needed

Gartner spoke about Social Networking last week and the need to utilise it within a business to embrace new technologies and forge stronger business relationships, so we thought we would also add some additional comments to it:

• Social media is a new and emerging communication channel. Enterprises will make the decision to utilise, resist or ignore it in the workplace. But opting to resist or ignore it is a decision – one that shuts your organisation off from valuable insight. 

• Work is a collaborative activity and humans interact as social beings during work. Few, if any, jobs can be completed without the involvement of collaborators so providing the resources makes users more effective.

• An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done. 

Social media is an additional communication channel that augments others such as the phone and email. It offers a new source of information and, perhaps, insight. I’m talking about the opportunity to actively seek information in real-time, as well as to mine collected information for new ideas and perspectives. As a Unified Messaging (amongst other technologies) consultancy, Dataplex can continually monitor what’s being said in social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn about topics and issues relevant to our customers (both internal and external). 

Work is a collaborative activity. Today people work on 8 – 15 projects at any point in time. They are constantly switching contexts and needing to create or re-establish work relationships. Social profiles give people the opportunity to find out about the expertise of colleagues and ‘get to know them’ even before they meet. They can shorten the bonding process that occurs as a new team forms and allow fellow workers to stay in touch with each other.

Need help on establishing your social media strategy and above all how to ensure it remains secure?  Email us.