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Social media has arrived. Get over it and get on with it.
That at least seemed to be the message futurist Don Tapscott held out to a gathering of technology executives this week. And he's not alone, in what seems to be a growing acceptance of the use of new social media forms in the workplace, companies are being urged to stop banning its use and start embracing it as both a tool for internal and external communication.
At its annual Symposium gathering in Orlando this week, research firm Gartner also advised chief information officers to balance the risk social networks pose with the benefits. Gartner vice president Carol Rozwell went so far as to say that banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile.
What is behind this groundswell of support for social media? It comes, in part, from a fear that senior executives – and their companies - may missing out on just how deeply social media is changing communication. There appears to be a generational gap.
Tapscott, who has spent a considerable amount of time studying how technology is being used by the so-called digital generation, says the teenage crowd and, more importantly, the generation about to enter the workforce has embraced social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter whole-heartedly. In fact, a whole generation is growing up rarely using email. Email has become something used only for formal communication – “it's how your parents communicate,” he says is the way teenagers now refer to it.
Tapscott's point wasn't that CIOs should give up on trying to put safeguards in place to protect the network from the risks posed by social networking, but he was encouraging them to find a way to strike a balance. He likened it to the early days of the Internet when companies were afraid to offer employees open access to the Internet for fear they'd spend their entire days surfing for celebrity gossip. The same fears of employees endlessly tweeting about their personal lives are also unfounded, he says.
And instead of criticizing teenagers for the way they like to text, tweet, surf the Internet and watch TV at the same time, he encourages grown-ups to pay closer attention.
“This is not the dumbest generation,” Tapscott said in reference to quips often made about how teenagers spend their days mindlessly texting one another. “This is the smartest generation. Think about it. For the first time in human history the next generation is an authority on something that is going to be really important.”
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