Does Social Media have a place in the workplace?

MLL Telecom - 12 October 2011

Companies are increasingly embracing the role of social media in day to day working life - workers use it to network, or for research, or troubleshooting. I asked a few colleagues to tot up the number of times they went online in a day, for work, and visited sites like Facebook and Twitter, forums, or read comments on an article etc. On average we visited sites seven times.

The most popular social media site was Linked In - for obvious reasons it is invaluable for networking. Even Twitter has come in handy... . We had a sudden influx of routers going down on one of our public sector wide area networks . Ben, one of our Senior NOC Engineers, had his suspicions as to the cause confirmed when he went on Twitter, searched '#powercut' and discovered that indeed there was a power cut that covered the exact perimeter of the faults.

I wonder when the one third of companies who currently ban their staff from social media sites, will gradually come to realise that it can be a legitimate workplace tool.

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