I was recently browsing through Scott Monty’s blog, the head of social media at Ford. His post about the new features that allow you to update LinkedIn via Twitter, and vice versa got me thinking. How long can the different social networks remain separate? People like things streamlined, and they don’t want to dig around a bunch of different places searching for what they need (especially in a business setting). It’s only a matter of time before someone develops a site where you can quickly and easily scan all of your favorite social networking sites at once.
Here in our office, we’ve discussed how younger people open themselves up to the world more than Gen X and Boomers. Kids today are comfortable sharing their Facebook self with friends and relatives alike. There’s no separation between the work/school version of themselves, the family version and the friend version.
But how will that sit with your employees? Employees are more accessible than they’ve ever been in the past. As smart phones get smarter (and cheaper), it’s not a stretch to think that tomorrow’s employee will have a mini-office in their pockets at all times, with everything they need to access their email, open and edit a file and share it with a client.
It all comes back around to the blending of business and pleasure when linking Twitter to LinkedIn. So how will this impact employee engagement? An employee who happily reads over a work email or sends a few quick thoughts to a coworker on the fly and outside of work is the holy grail of engaged employees.
But that might just be business as usual when Gen Z starts to enter the workforce.
To me, Twitter and LinkedIn are two of my favorite social networks but I use them for completely different uses and think they were designed for different purposes. If they merge its because what made them distinct wasn’t valuable.
One of the major benefits that Twitter brings is accessibility.
Why are some high-profile celebs are now quitting Twitter? Because they’re finding that all those ‘guess-what-I-had-for-breakfast’ type updates are making them a little TOO accessible to their fans.
But what is a negative for celebrities is a positive for business; Twitter helps humanise the impersonal face of companies and corporations.
In the same way, social media will bring new meaning to ‘engaged employees’.
As a consequence, work-life divisions will become increasingly and irreversibly blurred for subsequent generations of employees.