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Is Your Office Composed of "Monkeys With Typewriters?"
January 11, 2010
Social Media could be wreaking havoc on your workplace. Do you know the signs that it's working against, rather than for, your company?
According to Jemima Gibbons, author of the new book, "Monkeys With Typewriters: Myths and Realities of Social Media at Work," social media is about people, not technology, so to ensure you're optimizing it, look at the behavior in your office.
The creative and disruptive potential of the internet and the emerging power of social media has never been more apparent, the author says. Social media play a vital role in a global transformation where media are no longer merely for mass consumption, but also for production by large numbers of ordinary people, says Gibbons.
"Monkeys With Typewriters" attempts to debunk the idea that social media are an amateurish distraction for today's organizations. It addresses their true impact on the workplace, asking and answering questions such as:
• What are the risks and benefits of increasingly open systems? Can social tools improve working practices?
• What can managers do to ensure a smooth transition to a more innovative, collaborative working environment?
• How can managers adapt to the erosion of executive power in the new, more porous business environment?
The book is distilled from interviews with more than 50 "thought leaders" in the social Web: executives at Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce; developers at MySpace and Microsoft; and Web pioneers such as Tim O'Reilly and Craig Newmark. Also included are observations from CEOs of small, savvy start-ups, as well as lessons from senior staff from multinationals such as British Telecom, Ford, IBM, and Shell.
Gibbons identifies a series of social media best practices for organizations, which are presented as a framework to be applied to create happier, more productive organizations. The glossary of more than 150 social media terms is intended to be useful for newcomers to social media while also providing reference material for the more experienced.
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