Social Media at Work: Yes or No?

Even accounting for duplicate and inactive account logins, collectively, there are 750,000,000+ registered potential users (that’s 750 million for  those of you that got dazed by the zero’s) that are spending time online frittering away their lives looking at what other people do and commenting about questions or circumstances that affect each of us. Or so our corporate parents within Corporate Communications, Human Resources, Management or the Executive would have you believe.

A quick snapshot of the registered users for each of the below social networks yields some serious numbers.

Facebook: 200,000,000+
My Space: 260,000,000+
Linkedin: 42,000,000+
Twitter: 25,000,000+
Windows Live Spaces: 120,000,000+
Bebo: 40,000,000+
Flixster: 63,000,000+

And these are only the ‘big ones’ as cited by Wikipedia’s Social Networking websites list on 25th June 2009.

Depending on the medium in question, accessing any sort of social networking website whilst at work is generally construed as a time waster and as such sites like this often get “blocked” by the IT Dept. And in all seriousness, your erstwhile corporate guardians do have a point, as it impinges on productivity and has a monetary cost both from internet bandwidth as well as the loss of efficiency in your staff.

However the problem is one of understanding around the use of such networks correctly, both at work and in your private time. I’m constantly taken aback by the number of people who complain about unfair treatment because they’ve blown off some steam and made a comment about their workplace, a colleague or some sort of negative reference to their place of employment, the place they are paid to do a job and act in a professional  manner reflecting their organisations values. Since when was blasting out in a public forum considered an appropriate means of self expression and immune to the influence and rules which govern your workplace? You’re asked not to swear, dress inappropriately or be dishonest whilst at work, why is it any different to when you are out of work? There is a massive difference to having a whinge to your buddies down at the pub on a Friday night, verses publishing on the web for all to see, comments about the eating habits of the guy 3 cubicles up, or the appalling dress sense of the girl over in X department.

Or worse.

As @danwwilson Twittered recently: “I’m amazed that some people continue to think that twitter has a magical privacy cloak.”

Social Media sites are very important, as has been shown because of the groundswell of popular/negative opinion that can race across your screen with your friends endorsement/derision, your work colleagues recommendation/warding off all driven off just good old fashioned crowd dynamics. Doubly important in recent times, it has become readily apparent that responsible use can yield useful information and influence peoples thoughts and behaviours because of the common thread of what is a “trending topic” emerging for people to critique and access. Responsible use by everyone, both at work and privately needs to be governed by the businesses in the first place, so that employees are encouraged to elicit a sense of responsibility and ownership for their employer and their place within the organisation.

Simplistically put, if an organisation respectfully manages the staff, the staff will in turn respectfully manage the organisation.

To this end, I often advise business to articulate a clear Social Networking policy, around access, acceptable  and expected behaviour with clear guidelines as to the conseqences and outcomes of misconduct. This is no different to 15 years ago when Email started to enter the workplace and personal emails were initially frowned upon. Or 10 years ago when doing online banking. Or 5 years ago when you wanted to book tickets to something. Anyone who has a computer with Internet access in the workplace is likely to have a role where there is some amount of time where they wait for something to complete, are having lunch or doing research online.

It is nowadays quite common and reasonably expected that in their lunch break, employees may do some online banking, check the online news or book a movie/aerobics class/plane flights. Access to Social networks should fall under the same umbrella, with the encouragement of responsible usage, behavior and ownership. The other side of this is with an older workforce (think the Baby Boomer or Builder Generations) having to learn the computer skills such as typing and just basic navigation around the computer, if they are encouraged to use it in a social context on their lunch break, there is a very real advantage around increasing their familiarity and comfort level with the equipment. Anyone under the age of 30 will likely use a computer naturally – type quickly, understand basic navigational functionality and key concepts like saving and archiving files. This basic concept of technology use is severely misunderstood by IT Depts and many large organisations and the result is poor productively, decreased efficiency and often cost intensive training programs and “work” endorsed and targetted training. Employers who shift the culture and thinking to use of computers as a tool for getting your job done more quickly and allow access to the spread of social networking functions will reap the benefits of a happier and more satisfied workforce.

Employees are a valuable part of your workforce – that is why you pay them. Being responsible adults, structured and clear governance of their access to such facilities with clear guidelines will be reflected in how they treat their role – with a sense of pride and ownership. The ultimate outcome will be a workforce which has less to complain about, and will have a deeper appreciation of their role within the organisation, as critically, they will be offered a sense of ownership and respect within the business.

Social Media at work? Yes.

With appropriate communication, you will have a happier and more productive workforce, who will feel valued and respected for their contributions.

Our Holiday

Recently, Katie & I have been lucky enough to spend some time (3 weeks actually) away. We escaped the cold of the Melbourne winter (and from what I hear a broken heater at the office) and basked in the sunny climate of 23 degrees in Caloundra. I went for a run every day, read alot of books and magazines, caught up with friends in BrisVegas and did some kayaking and most importantly, got to spend all day, every day with Noah & Katie. Watched him take his first steps. Very nice, relaxing time.

Website Building Tools

Over the years I have collected a bunch of useful open source tools which have helped tremendously in building and maintaining websites. Most important – they are FREE! If you really want to go to town and have the funds get yourself Adobe Web Premium (Illustrator, Photoshop, Contribute, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat, Soundbooth)  and start looking at a software configuration management system, which manages your built environment with versions, baseline projects and affords the ability to build up a code base. But in lieu of burning some money, the free ones are below.

If you have any suggestions, I’d love to you hear from you and I’ll add the useful ones to this list.

File Transfer Protocol Program (FTP Client)
FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org

HTML/CSS Editing
Notepad ++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Image File Viewers/ Basic Editors
FastStone http://www.faststone.org – Slick looking interface. Really good for managing large numbers of images. Can bog down in network drive situations i.e. cataloguing images across multiple hard drives/server locations, however this can be rectified by dumping the Thumbnail database on a regular basis. Can view PSD’s.
Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com – Fast loading, non intrusive. Not quite as flexible as Faststone, it nonetheless is lightweight enough to run concurrently when you just want a fast preview of images sent to you i.e. email attachments.

Rulers for measuring windows, images, text blocks
Sizer http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html. Brilliant, lightweight application for quickly resizing windows to any parameter you care to program in i.e. 1280X1024, 1280X 800 (laptops), 1024X768, 640X480. Will work with ALL windows, outside of the browser i.e. Photoshop, etc.
Screen Ruler http://wonderwebware.com/screen-ruler/ Configurable floating ruler pain which has X & Y planes with configurable transparency.

Firefox Browser Plugins
Firebug, Cooliris, Screengrab! I wrote about Firefox Plugins’ in my post Software: Firefox Browser Extensions

PDF for Finished Art
Cute PDF Writer http://www.cutepdf.com/ If you are producing print quality finished art or into publication of e-zines or editorial variants of a book, collected works etc, consider upgrading to the Pro edition. Significantly cheaper than Adobe’s Acrobat offering and I find the compression algorithm and font handling to be either equal or on better.

Evernote
http://www.evernote.com
Fantastic web based application which allows you to jot down notes, import images and manage articles in a secure, password protected environment. Once items are imported, they are indexed and you can perform searches on them. The ultra cool aspect about Evernote is the ability to import images with writing on it and Evernotes servers run Optical Character Recognition protocols on it, allowing indexing of the words in the image. So, you can take a photo of a business card (MAC = Photobooth, PC = MSN, Trillion, Logitech Cam etc) and it will index the details.

Contact’s Management
So you have hundreds of contacts, they sit in your iPhone or Blackberry. Store them securely online and Sync them with one of the below:

• Google Contacts in Gmail - http://www.gmail.com
• HighRise by 37 Signals – http://www.highrisehq.com
• Zoho CRM – http://www.zoho.com