There’s been quite the Twit­ter and blo­gos­phere con­ver­sa­tion about this arti­cle in the News Lim­ited papers today on employ­ees wast­ing time using Face­book (and by infer­ence other social com­put­ing tools).

It annoyed me so much, I was com­pelled to com­ment on the arti­cle on the News web­site. I was a (fairly lonely) voice of dis­sent amongst the “fire the Face­book users” comments.

It bugs me no end that the Aus­tralian media rep­re­sent social com­put­ing use in a busi­ness con­text (no, actu­ally, social com­put­ing gen­er­ally) in such a neg­a­tive way. As my peer, Lau­rel Pap­worth says on her reac­tion to the story:

They HATE us. With a pas­sion. Every arti­cle about blogs, wikis, Face­book, MySpace and social net­works is one about stalk­ers, pae­dophiles, time-​​wasters at work, mis-​​information, and– God help us — poor grammar/​spellingz? Am I miss­ing any other rea­sons to hate col­lab­o­ra­tive con­tent? And it’s work­ing — either Web 2.0 tech­nol­ogy is belit­tled as in “ha ha you blog? That’s so funny” or we get Orwellian tones of doom “go on Face­book and you will lose your job, be stalked and be addicted, all by lunch time”.

I couldn’t have said it any better.

The prob­lem is that social com­put­ing, as reported in the Aus­tralian media is just wrong.

They almost never seek out an active, suc­cess­ful social com­put­ing user. They cer­tainly don’t talk to social com­put­ing strate­gists like Lau­rel and me. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story in the Aus­tralian media about suc­cess­ful , real-​​world business-​​centric imple­men­ta­tions of social com­put­ing tools.

Con­se­quently, the Aus­tralian pub­lic and busi­ness are being fairly sig­nif­i­cantly mis­led on the tan­gi­ble, mea­sur­able and real ben­e­fits a well-​​crafted, appro­pri­ate social com­put­ing strat­egy can have in busi­ness and the per­sonal ben­e­fits it can offer peo­ple — from doing their job bet­ter, to con­nect­ing to pro­fes­sional net­works, to find­ing long lost school friends.

I have no argu­ment that there are prob­a­bly a good per­cent­age of social com­put­ing users wast­ing time at work on Face­book, but you know what, that’s a man­age­ment issue (so I believe) from a few angles:

  • if these peo­ple are wast­ing time rather that get­ting their work done, they’d find a way to do so whether or not they were using Face­book, MySpace or whatever;
  • are these peo­ple in fact, under­utilised? Do they have enough work to do? And there­fore, is it actu­ally a prob­lem of man­age­ment abil­ity to dis­trib­ute work rather than indi­vid­u­als goof­ing off?
  • are they using social tools to actu­ally get some­thing done that their employer doesn’t facil­i­tate as iden­ti­fied in the recent Katzen­bach Part­ners report The Infor­mal Orga­ni­za­tion or using a non-​​approved tool because their employer doesn’t pro­vide the nec­es­sary tools as reported by Yan­kee Group in their report Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Man­age­ment?

Just once, I’d love a jour­nal­ist talk­ing about social com­put­ing to call me and ask a few ques­tions. I’d be more than happy to give them my time and clear up a few misconceptions.