Employers can empower their employees to build strong networks that can help to grow moral and grow business assuming there is a strategy behind the effort. It will be interesting to see how this idea catches on.

Great comments!

James
http://www.Twitter.com/AskJamesHolmes

What I do recall is that people are on Facebook every day even from work. They will just socialize PUBLICLY at work on Facebook Fridays.

As an employer, I would make it part of the Marketing Dept for perhaps 1-3 hours a day. As we all know (you twitterites) it can all get rather addicting. How is a person to get any work done?

Half the country (US) is unemployed sitting at home socializing on Facebook now. 20 years ago there would have been an uproar. As long as they can afford to pay the internet DSL bill all is well. Can people pay for their phone/internet connection with food stamps?

Just chatting.

Lee
http://www.Chat2Text.mobi

However, I have identified myself as an employee of Pinstripe, Inc. without hesitation. One of the reasons, being that I could post my ‘web sites’ as Pinstripe sites – and that is one of the simple boosts to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that I can do! one of the ‘rating’ factors is on how many various servers and sites a web site is listed – adding my site address to Facebook helps boost us just a bit more!

So in my case social media will be used only for internal communications but just in that case I will face with many challenges. Imagine the fear of the superiors: the subordinates can easily solve the tasks thanks to the social networking for example (I mean European-wide). Now, the superiors cannot pretend that they were the brains behind the solution because the colleagues at an other location of the group company will exactly know, who is the one, who solved their problem.

Alright, I only wanted to show that social media could be a threat to certain people within the enterprise. So if that means a threat to them inside why would they want it to spread outside…

So many people in my industry (telecom) suffer from the “if there is internet, it MUST be surfed in favor of anything else” syndrome. Allowing access to social networks in it usually results in employees spending more time updating status, chatting about non-work topics and whatnot, so when you ask an employee who is clearly not doing anything except spending time on social networks to help out with a deadline, they answer with “sorry, I’m busy” and restore the browser window.

As a user of a few social networking sites and twitter, I feel that they definitely have some value… but open access and encouragement shouldn’t be provided by some companies until they are sure their employees can use these tools responsibly.

I put in between 50 and 60 hours a week at work and get a lot done. Yet when I walk around here, I see others frantically alt-tabbing between windows. If you’ve got something to hide, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it at work, you know?

I feel the same way about instant messaging. I think it can be very valuable in some industries, but in others (like telecom), many folks require you use it, but then treat it as a tool to get in your face. We’re in telecom, but no one uses the phone anymore.

If used properly and in moderation, I think that social networking tools can be a great resource. But it is going to take a lot of training (and possibly a lot of big brother oversight) to make sure that they are not being overused, or inappropriately used.

I’m helping a company start up a Twitter account that multiple employees will post to. I’m going to lead the training soon and the employees are looking forward to it. At the same place, many of the employees have their own Facebook accounts (of course) which adds to the business networking.

Thanks for the topic Patrick.