Posts Tagged 'Social Networking'

How Can You Deal With Social Media Overload?

Posted on December 30th, 2016 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

The Info Overload guru is taken by surprise I was talking to a college student, and she threw me a question:  how can she deal with the overwhelming  information overload afflicting her life? She then elaborated, and to my surprise it turned out the overload was not the familiar push-mode problem typical of email; she was talking about pull-mode, specifically, Facebook and RSS. This was a surprise for two reasons: first, because here was a Gen Y person complaining about Facebook, the social network that her cohort is so famously in love with; and second, because I’d always advocated RSS.. Read more

Why and How Retirement Workshops Should Teach Baby Boomers About Social Media

Posted on October 22nd, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

A serendipitous request Much of the cooler stuff that I do happens serendipitously, when someone hears of me and comes with a request for something different. In this case it was a friend of a friend who runs workshops for corporate employees approaching retirement. She wanted a lecture about the Internet, to be given to retirees of a Lo-Tech company. At first this seemed a problem:  I consult about social media adoption by Gen Y in the enterprise, but that’s the very opposite of Lo-Tech Baby Boomers in their mid-sixties! But as I thought about it I realized that a.. Read more

Just Published: New Article on HR’s Role in Social Media Adoption

Posted on August 23rd, 2012 · Posted in Uncategorized

The August issue of HR magazine, which is devoted to Knowledge Management, published an article I wrote titled אתגר והזדמנות: ארגון משאבי אנוש כקטליזטור בהטמעת מדיה חברתית בארגון (Challenge and Opportunity: the HR Group as a Catalyst in Social Media Adoption in the Enterprise). It derives from my passionate belief that organizations need to embrace employees’ use of advanced IT and Internet tools, while guiding adoption sensibly. And being in an HR management journal, it speaks specifically of why HR is ideally positioned to facilitate the adoption of Gen Y tools and mindset in organizations often led by older managers… Read more

Now, Facebook has its medals!

Posted on August 15th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Off-topic

One common response to mention of Facebook among the Gen X and Baby Boomer (in other words, over 30) crowd is the disdainful “Why would I want people to know what I had for breakfast?!”  Use of Facebook, these people declare, is shallow and silly. Now, it is true that many people – and not just youngsters – post to their Facebook stream rather unimportant  snippets from their daily routine; and their Friends on the service can ignore it or react to it with equally inane comments. But that’s hardly unique to Facebook; people getting together in a bar or.. Read more

Paperclips and Facebook policy in the workplace

Posted on June 16th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I remember well the hysteria around Internet use in the workplace. Back in the mid-nineties, it suddenly became possible for employees to access the newly invented World Wide Web from their computers at work, and managers in many companies were mortified: people might (perish the thought!) use company assets for non-business use, and in doing so waste work time! Back then, we saw many knee-jerk reactions in the corporate world. Memos would be issued asserting that no one may access the net without written manager approval, based on “business need”; anyone who violated this wise edict would be severely punished!.. Read more

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Posted on February 15th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years. More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms. I’ve.. Read more

Facebook: a third factor in enterprise Information Overload?

Posted on January 13th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Information Overload can have manifold manifestations: physicians have more new articles coming out in their field than they can possibly cover, consumers have too many TV channels to choose from comfortably, journalists have a hard time staying on top of breaking news, and so forth. But in the enterprise, the domain of the knowledge worker population I belong to and serve, Information Overload took a fairly predictable and well-characterized form, and it had two underlying components: Email Overload and Interruptions (a.k.a. distractions). Until recently, this was it; find a way to handle the hundred or (many) more incoming emails a.. Read more

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Posted on August 12th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it! This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was.. Read more

Facebook encroaches on email and blog interaction

Posted on July 18th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I observed in my April newsletter that we may be approaching an inflection point: the next generation of workers may not be as eager as their predecessors to “Live in their Email” – they may well choose to live in Facebook, or some equivalent, instead. Some of the younger generation already forgo using email today: they want to talk to their social circle, and doing so in Facebook, where they do indeed live, comes naturally. Whether this will also happen (at least in part) in the workplace is still unknown, but it’s worth considering – is being considered, I’ve seen,.. Read more