Today’s enterprise employees use, hopefully at home, Flickr, Yahoo!, Facebook, and other online tools with rich user experiences. Increasingly, they are demanding that at work.
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At first, this seems an absurd question. Of course, the individual owns it. But, is this accurate? And what do we mean by “own”? What what is owned? What if you work at a company? What if that company supports your LinkedIn activity? What if that company pays you to make contacts? To be sure, there are many questions of ownership. In this discussion, I’d like to focus on one, specific question: who owns the expressions about your current employer?
OK, it seems that about once a year the ‘next great social media tool’ emerges. This year, it seems to be Twitter. Last year, it was Facebook. A couple of years ago, LinkedIn was all the rage. That leads me to a couple of burning questions:
Synchronous communication requires an equal time and attention commitment from each party. In contrast, social media typically relies on the convenience and flexibility of asynchronous communication. That is, it allows parties to communicate even when they are not online at the same time. The flexibility ensures ease of use of the tool. The communicator can post whenever and the recipient can pick up the message when it suits. Email is a good example of this. This mode of communication is efficient for both sides because it takes little time to “drop off” or “pick up” a message when you don’t need to think about the overhead of synchronous communication—thinking about the other person, waiting for them to respond, thinking about your response, and so on.
Recently, however, I have seen an increase in the synchronicity of social media. Twitter and Facebook now seem to demand, and receive, constant attention. Status updates get replies in real-time. Tweets are answered in seconds. This indicates that these media have become synchronous: the parties are in communication at the same time. And, in so doing, these media are losing their efficiency. As they lose their efficiency, they become more like work. That is, they demand more and more time from participants. And as this happens, we can expect the use of social media in the workplace to come under increased scrutiny, especially in this economy.
We have to be careful when considering why is it communication that we call social that we don’t relax in what’s on synchronist communication. Synchronist communication apparently risky because they have–require much higher commitment from both parties. Instead, be sure to focus also on a synchronist communication, in fact we’re underestimating the importance and the role of the e-mail.