Bosses Half-Hearted About Social Media
Making use of the business opportunities created by the new Social Media has become an issue for management – only that managers feel ambivalent about participating themselves. This is the main conclusion from a survey by Europe’s biggest telecommunications company, Deutsche Telekom, alongside with defacto.x and Selbst-GmbH.
The survey attracted responses from 477 managers in Germany. A high 80% declared they were active in Social Media, perhaps a reflection of the web-based nature of the survey. The majority of the respondents were registered with the business-network Xing, a platform for communicating with colleagues and having a glimpse at their contacts. The American equivalent LinkedIn is popular mainly for establishing and maintaining international business relations.
SMEs mostly do not have a Social Media strategy. « They realise that something important is going on, but they don’t know how to participate and how to define their purpose on Web 2.0 », says Jens Cornelsen, one of the authors of the survey. Most smaller companies are still at an experimental stage, trying Wikis, company blogs or collaborative platforms like Microsoft Sharepoint. Half of the participants declared that Social Media were clearly useful for external communication, distribution and innovation.
The group psychological situation seems to be the same as in the mid-1990s, when the internet and e-mail became popular. For junior staff, Social Media and their implications, flat hierarchies for example, are obviously part of life. Senior management remains reluctant, being more sensitive about data protection and a possible waste of time. HRM seems to be most cautious of all, very rarely making use of the new instruments provided by Social Media.
Nevertheless, one out of three German managers is already more than a simple observer, publishing information or sharing their knowledge, for example in Wikis.
Contact us
for additional information.
