Study: Surfing Social Networks at Work Could Be Good for You
Study: Surfing Social Networks at Work Could Be Good for You

                                
            
    


            
            
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Well, here we are in the final days of October 2008, and two individuals at the UK-based think tank Demos, Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves, have published a 92-page assessment of the potential upsides of social networking within organizations and between organizations and clients.The text (which, wonderfully enough, has been issued as a PDF [link] under a non-commercial Creative Commons licensing) is titled “Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work,” and it essentially takes what is arguably a sensible view on the present networking situation. They see workplace bans on Facebook and YouTube as “almost impossible to enforce,” and they draw a sort of sociological analogy to such efforts that would entail limits for gossip among colleagues. A nonsensical move, more or less.
    


            
            
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Yes, it is true that the issues of lowered barriers and intensive PC-based socializing reveal things that can be prone to exploitation in quite negative ways. As the authors of “Network Citizens” state, the networks have a definitive “dark side.” Yet the benefits for the pursuit of a relatively happy medium (my own phrasing) have really become too outstanding to negate.Such benefits have only grown with developments made in the market specific to business relationship management - which goes as much for workers’ presence on LinkedIn as YouTube, depending of course on one’s area of industry. All things considered, corporations currently exercising no-social-networking policies would do well to browse the ideas delivered via this research.
                    
                    