Social Notworking

With the rise of twitter and other lifestreaming microblogs as company owners we have to ask the question, where is the value in staff twittering in company time?

It seems that some“twitterers” are busy building their own
brand and social notworking n work time. Particularly for small companies in the digital sector we have to be watchful that the staff are fully productive and not wasting company time.

The argument for the twitterati is that they are spreading the knowledge and brand values of the company in an innovative and experimental way. Certainly there are some published case studies from companies such as zappos.com who have actively encouraged their staff to twitter and claim that they have built an exponential growth in sales, from the word of mouth marketing effect. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php.

Social media must have a point if it is encouraged in work time. We are currently in the phase of understanding what that point is and how we can utilize the various social media to deliver our message. We also see that social networking carries a lot of noise and irrelevance and perhaps the time has come for our industry to try to give direction on the acceptable content of the messages and the people in the network to meet an end goal.