Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Why You Should be Reading Facebook at Work (pt 1)


Okay, so we're all grownups here and we each want to fulfill the promise we made when we took our jobs. What promise? Well, I can't really speak for you, but I'd guess that it amounts to something like: Because of what I do, this team will succeed. It's up to each of us (with varying levels of input from the boss) to determine what that looks like.

So it's easy to relate to the time you spend reading Community, or your email as a part of that. Both of those sources carry important information about what the team needs to succeed. You might even consider that reading Wall Street Journal or listening to NPR's Marketplace is a contribution.

But did you ever consider that what you might read on Facebook, or Twitter, or on Google+ can also be a contribution to that picture?  You see, those platforms (when you know how to read them) each contain a steady stream of insight into what's happening in the marketplace, what's happening to our customers, and what's working in business.


I know, I know.  Most of us think that Facebook is just where we see pictures of our friends' babies (or puppies) and pictures of what they had for lunch.  Most of us think that Twitter is just a vanity platform for celebrities to drench us with pithy thoughts about their babies and who they had for lunch.  And many of us think that Google+ is simply a forlorn attempt by Google to get into the social media game a little too late and well, a little too late.

There's a lot more to the story.

Facebook provides a platform for us to read (and say) what's going on in the world around us.  And the definition of the "world around us" can be altered dynamically by simply changing how you read the news.

I've asked around and am pretty sure that most of us don't know how to get the most out of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

In part 2 of this article, we'll look at some things you can do at Facebook to get a lot more value of the time you spend there.  In part 3, we'll look at Twitter and see how it might cause you to cancel your newspaper subscription. In the final part, we'll look into what's available at Google+ and why it might just be the platform that eventually transforms or replaces the others.

So yeah, see you next time... (Oh, and yeah - get back to work!)

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