Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.
So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.
The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.
Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.
Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.
