On a fine Friday evening... I was enjoying the company of good friends. Two were bankers, another a regional manager for a local brewery company, an accountant of a well established law firm, a treasury bond broker, few were marketeers and of course bunch of engineers mostly out of software industry.... the point: it was a good sample of professionals from different kind of organizations and job roles. Topic in discussion was work environments and cultures, I narrowed it down to use of social media inside corporates.
In many organizations, social networking sites were blocked. Bankers had networks that made them feel like they were kept in sandboxes, this was the same case for the well established law firm, some of the software houses were flexible while some were rigid. Marketeers seems to enjoy all the cyber realm.
Looking at so many variables that are in effect, I realize it is not very smart to generalize how different industries look at social media. But there were some facts that were so obvious therefore it was worth noticing. Coporates such as banks, law firms, brokers simply could not afford the risk of having their networks open to social networking sites, especially due to security seasons. On the other end, marketeers needed to have unblocked visibility of what-ever they want to look at. In the middle ground were software engineers, who's work environments and cultures were mostly varied due to way of thinking of their company founders. How they trusted their employees with their productivity and use of social media. Interesting!
Wait a minute! I said. Why our thinking is limited to "social networking sites" when we say "Social media"?! The way I see this, it's a most common limitation in our views. Social media should be about any media that let people socialize. Can it be just plain company web intranet? Or status message in internal messenger, a coperate micro blogging tool such as Yammer, sticky note that you paste on somebody's cubical, or the notice board on cafeteria? Yes, all of that. All of that can be ways one can express him or her self socially, so that they can make identity among the community in context. All those will reflect who you are, and ultimately it'll define the organizational culture.
I concluded the chat with my friends, with something that Dileepa pointed out at once of EC tech talk debates... when world wide web was becoming popular on internet, companies wanted to block access to it. But today, we can't do much productive work without the world wide web! Perspectives do change, coporate policies evolve and the way we look at tools at our disposal should change. It's time to rethink, are you making most effective use of social media for your organization?
