Social Media: Business Ally or Enemy?

With so many websites available for people to visit at any time using the Internet, companies have long put barriers on what sites their employees can access while using the company’s Internet service. However, in our rapidly advancing world, it is becoming necessary, from an IT perspective, to unblock social media in the workplace.

Since social media has such a high volume of users, companies need to be able to embrace it in their everyday actions. For example, it is difficult for online marketing managers to truly gauge the effectiveness of social media advertising campaigns without having access to the sites that they are being advertised on. Also, as Ann Bednarz addresses in her article on CIO.com, “HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they feel hampered by overly restrictive usage policies.”

The challenge in loosening restrictions to social media sites, however, is being able to ensure that the social media access is not detrimental to the productivity within the firm. One solution is to adopt acceptable use policies, which would spell out what purposes social media should and should not be used for in the workplace. However, many times guidelines like these fail to address every single issue that could arise, resulting in many instances of gray area in terms of the intended purpose of the sites.

I think what the issue with social media in businesses boils down to is a lack of trust in employees to stay on task if they are given access to their personal social media sites. In this conflict, I would have to side with the management, even though I am from an ‘employee’ standpoint as a student. If my professor were my boss, and I their employee, and I was assigned work to do for that class, I can guarantee that I would visit my social media sites regularly while doing the work. This access severely slows my progress and can also affect my ultimate performance on the assignments. With this in mind, I think in a workplace, where performance is critical to a much larger group of people, social media could have a negative impact on businesses. It is up to senior management now to decide what is right for their firm and if social media itself can be trusted to be an ally, and not the enemy.