Surviving Social Media In The Workplace: A Kit

Shirley Ogolla, Thomas Wagenknecht You probably have already used
some Enterprise Social Software today - name it Slack, Yammer or
even just a Google Drive. Such tools are meant to facilitate
communication and collaboration within enterprises - which is
pretty much what the E-Mail had promised in the 1980s. Later we saw
chat services and social networks, but no matter how much smarter
these technologies get, they are all eventually hitting a sort of
sonic barrier: With higher speed, transparency and openness, the
white noise becomes louder and louder, too. A new collaborative
tool, does not always come with more collaboration in the long
term. Instead we notice, that more communication and collaboration
implies more cat content, than anything else. And furthermore
transparency comes with more control by management all too often,
too. The reason for this lies in the particular interdependence of
information technologies and power relations within a company. The
actual and most important function of an enterprise is to organize
knowledge, as many scholars agree. That is precisely why a firm’s
social structure depends so strongly on its IT, and also why the
introduction of a knowledge management system can turn an
enterprise’s power patterns upside down. For instance, advice may
no longer be sought from bosses, but from whomever colleague makes
the most savvy and useful posts on the enterprise wiki. If the
existing hierarchy - the monkey’s rock - fights this change, the
entire idea of Social Collaboration is bound to failure. We will
talk about what is actually "new" about Enterprise Social Media
(and what is not), we will look at the promises of participation
and empowerment of the worker precisely and will give users a
Survival Kit on how one can survive in the Jungle of bosses that
"follow" you, cat content that distracts you and lurking
colleagues.