Social networking in the workplace: Here to stay

Insightful analysis by consultants Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler, plus links to the latest WAN news headlines

A few weeks ago, we began a discussion of various aspects of "Social Networking in the Workplace" and invited you to participate in a survey on the topic. And while we're still gathering some last-minute data and analyzing the results, there are some trends that are becoming overwhelmingly clear.

12 tips for safe social networking

So far as the demographics of the respondents are concerned, some of the most surprising results came here. So much for this being for kids. Almost half of the respondents were 45 years old or more, and another 30% were in the 35 to 44 year old category. Also, in a trend that is somewhat unusual for the Webtorials community, these were not primarily in the "early adopter" category.

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A few weeks ago, we began a discussion of various aspects of "Social Networking in the Workplace" and invited you to participate in a survey on the topic. And while we're still gathering some last-minute data and analyzing the results, there are some trends that are becoming overwhelmingly clear.

12 tips for safe social networking

So far as the demographics of the respondents are concerned, some of the most surprising results came here. So much for this being for kids. Almost half of the respondents were 45 years old or more, and another 30% were in the 35 to 44 year old category. Also, in a trend that is somewhat unusual for the Webtorials community, these were not primarily in the "early adopter" category.

Not surprisingly, two of the top services that are used by this group are LinkedIn and Facebook. However, when asked which are most appropriate for business usage, LinkedIn was a run-away winner, and Facebook was near the bottom. In fact, Facebook had less than half the positive responses (for business) that Twitter did.

That said, the clear majority felt that social media are already important to business, and a much larger number felt that social media would be important in the future, with roughly half indicating that social media would be "very important."

The most disturbing trend from a corporate networking perspective is that for a plurality of the respondents, there is no well-defined policy for the organization's attitude/policy toward social media use, and where there is a policy slightly more encourage use than discourage use.

Similarly, when it comes to enforcing the policy, almost half had no specific enforcement, but a goodly number had technology-based enforcement of some form in addition to using an “"onor system."

As the data is further collected and analyzed, we'll continue to let you know about the results.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.