Social for Social’s Sake

A lot of organizations are trying to leverage social media platforms in the workplace to create value for the overall business. Whether its knowledge sharing, recruiting talent or making the company a better place to work, CEO’s believe the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms can help. However, my personal perspective on the topic is that these CEO’s face several difficult challenges:

• CEO’s do not know how to properly adopt and leverage social media platforms within the workplace
• When social media is used by corporations, it is often than not, highly curated and choreographed which makes it inauthentic
• Social media in the workplace is like a dormant volcano — i.e. there is a high risk waiting to erupt

Confusion in Implementation:

Given the fact that there are very few success stories of implementing social media in the workplace, it goes to show that there is a lot of confusion of how value can truly be extracted from social media in this context. This challenge is largely driven by two factors. Firstly, one cannot cookie cut a use case from a success story, because it needs to align with the type of business, employees and the nature of the platform being used. Secondly, social media is very dependent on the audience. Not all platforms work with every corporate culture. There needs to be alignment between culture and platform. Frankly speaking, not all corporate cultures can adopt a social media platform within the workplace.

Can’t Fake Social Media in the Workplace:

Because such a public aspect of an organization, companies often place a considerable amount of energy of presenting only the best side of the business. This lopsided perspective of the business creates a lack of authenticity amongst the audience. The choreography of Facebook posts and Instagram pictures makes people think it is all fake and thus less engaged in the content. This will result in failure of achieving any value for the business.

Ready to Blow Up!

The viral nature of social media platforms makes it is very hard to manage. As we have seen over the course of this semester, there are numerous examples of companies getting social media wrong. Therefore, social media in the workplace presents a significant risk that definitely can erode value to the business.