Tweeting and Facebooking Employees At Work Can Add Value to Your Business? YES!

Well at least according to the Harvard Business Review Blog! I can definitely see the dilemma of why employers wouldn’t like their employees to be involved with social media during working hours (how many times have you heard somebody saying (or thought of it yourself) – ‘I don’t pay him/her to spend their time on Facebook!’?). Obviously you can’t leave your employees tweeting about their last night of heavy drinking, but add a bit of structure to the “computer-based sociality” and your company can gain a lot. At the end of the day social media is all about exchanging information, whether that’s ideas, thoughts, knowledge or expertise it doesn’t matter. What does work effectiveness requires? Think about it! Don’t you want your employees to exchange knowledge, share their expertise and help each other with different tasks? Social media tools can provide an easy to use platform, which does not require good (in matter of fact ANY AT ALL) knowledge management.

Tom Davenport provides a great example of a social media tool being successfully utilised for a business – Salesforce.com introducing Chatter. The tool provides the opportunity for salespeople within the company to enter a Chatter discussion and check with other employees before actually imputing the probability of a big sale to a customer.  Salesforce.com’s personnel are automatically notified if there has been any change in the status of their customer accounts. Very importantly the social tool has been exclusively used for BUSINESS DISCUSSION.

So go ahead, add something social to your business structure and your work could get done a lot faster and way more efficiently.