I went to a meeting with some colleagues from an affiliated team recently and they told me they had created a Facebook Group. I asked them how many members the FB group has. They told me none. I asked them how many people they had invited to join the group, again the answer was none. I hope I have not upset them by joining the group and inviting some other people we work with to join too. They also told me it had taken five months to get permission from their IT department to access Facebook at work and that only two people from the team are allowed to use it.
Thinking about this afterwards, it did make me wonder if, in the short term atleast, social media tools will be more effective for private rather than public sector organisations. In particular, SMEs in creative industries are able to respond to events rapidly and do not have the beauroctratic restraints which public sector employees have to live with.
You make a good observation Vivienne. You're not alone. I too have noticed restrictions in the public sector with respect to access to some social media sites, here in Toronto Canada as well. I think there are a lot less people engaging on these networks than people are preaching, or it's certain groups anyway and not others.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that however, from what I'm hearing and reading, no organisation can afford to not engage in social media communications. I think in the interim there is a conflict and contradiction because many of these organisations may potentially be engaging in online social media and yet on the other hand are blocking access to these very same tools to their employees to prevent them from communicating on these sites during work hours.
I'm going to discuss more about this in an upcoming posting on my blog: http://radnadpr.blogspot.com/