Conventional thinking would lead you to believe that things like instant messengers, Twitter, and social networking sites are really just distractions from the world of work and they ultimately hamper the productivity of a company’s employees. After all, if someone is going around superpoking people on Facebook or yakking it up with a friend on Windows Live Messenger, there’s a good chance that they are not working on that important project or following up with customers for new contracts.
That’s conventional thinking. In this new age of business, however, companies have an opportunity to take advantage of the same kind of technology underlying popular online destinations and translate them to something that would actually benefit the company. Perhaps the best example is where several people, possibly from different offices around the world, need to collaborate on a certain project. The conventional way to do this would be to arrange for a teleconference or to make use of multiple email messages.
What’s the typical result of these? You get multiple versions of the same file floating around and e-mail inboxes that are overflowing with redundant messages. Where some companies are going to alleviate this issue is with a business-minded take on social networking. Take the framework of something like MySpace or Facebook, and allow the employees to freely interact with one another.
A Facebook-style “group”, for instance, could be used to share thoughts on an internal bulletin board. Questions can be asked and answered without cluttering so many e-mail inboxes. Furthermore, using a framework similar to Google Documents, files can be shared and updated on the fly, ensuring that only the most up-to-date version is being used. Technology can do a lot to improve productivity! It’s just about how you choose to use it.
