Last week’s two-hour Twitter outage was inconvenient for some, devastating to others. Whether it affected you at all is irrelevant; it proved that social media has become omnipresent.
I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.
The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.
Here are highlights from this week’s stories:
Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.
CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty.
“For every employee that accidentally leaks a business deal on Twitter,” Lynch wrote, “four others connect with people that day who bring in new business.”
Lynch wasn’t as harsh on the military as we were. While he pointed out social networking’s potential for keeping the ranks in touch with family and friends, he conceded that the Marine Corps had good reasons for banning it.
Study Time
Two studies of note came out in the past few weeks. One, from Proofpoint Inc., found that 34 percent of American companies have been hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past year, and 45 percent are worried about such information being leaked via Facebook and Twitter.
Another study, by Nucleus Research, offers up some scary stats for managers:
- 77 percent of workers have a Facebook account
- Of those with accounts, almost two-thirds access Facebook during business hours
- 87 percent of them couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it
If there’s one takeaway from these two studies, it’s that companies should stop ignoring social media. Whether they choose to embrace it (think Zappos) or do the equivalent of covering their ears while repeating “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you” (the Marines, see above entry), it must be addressed.
Social Media: The New Drug
Borrowing a concept from the smartphone realm, Computerworld quoted a source in an article last week who declared that the public has become addicted to “social media crack.” The mag ran a piece about Twitter’s Aug. 6 outage, and addressed the effect the two-hour lull had on users.
The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters. That’s what Computerworld says, and that’s what experts say. If people are so smitten with a new technology, one that has the power to boost business, why wouldn’t you figure out how to use it to your company’s advantage? Not doing so is just silly. (Jen Darr)
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