Social networking preserves the corporate culture
There is a stigma that all employees using social networking tools on company time are poking Facebook friends and updating MySpace graphics and not being productive. If you believe that, you must recognize people are unique and use the web for different purposes.
Liz Strauss indicates social networking falls into four quadrants: content consumers, relationship builders, social networkers, and content creators. I consider myself in the fourth category, for instance, evident by longer, well thought-out, and easy-to-read posts like this. Which category are you?
By blocking access or enforcing rules, you are potentially preventing valuable employees from engaging with horizontal industry peers on research projects, recruiting graduate students who congregate on Facebook, and decreasing your ROI. Keep in mind C-level executives are doing it too; they are probably the relationship builders and social networkers, enhancing their personal branding and corporate branding.
Social networks are necessary to embed employee knowledge and corporate pride, argue Scott Droege and Jenny Hoobler in a 2003 article published in the Journal of Managerial Issues.
...firms with social structures that enhance the transfer of non-redundant knowledge, when coupled with dense networks where interaction and collaboration occur frequently, are less likely to suffer the effects of tacit knowledge loss due to employee turnover.The authors wrote of face-to-face networking but their thesis may as well apply to internet networking which has nowhere to go but up in today's changing world. I endorse Leo Babauta of Zen Habits who suggests 12 new rules for the workplace you should embrace today.
One aspect Babauta doesn't mention is the emergence and widespread usage of personal digital assistants like the BlackBerry and iPhone, which can connect to the internet by GPS. So, even if you prevent employees from using your corporate computer networks to access sites, what prevents one from using the iPhone and an installed third-party application to cellularly connect to Facebook?
The background to this post stems from a children's book I borrowed from my public library, entitled, Should Social Networking Web Sites Be Banned?
As with anything in life, don't say no without rationalizing the reason you're saying no. You can't use the excuse because everyone else is saying no because the above statistics and the previous two parts to this series indicate companies are reacting differently.
What do you think? Did you learn anything in this series? Would you like to see similar series, where instead of one long post on a subject it is broken up into smaller chunks?
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