The Impact of Social Networking Sites on Workplace Productivity, Article Review Example

The abstract of the article illustrates the extensive use of social networking sites as tools in enhancing the relational experience among employees and managers. The choice of businesses and organizations in preference of either the consumer social networking sites or an enterprise network is dependent on the desired level of integration that matches organizational objectives with the organizational learning, marketing efforts, and public relations strategies.

The article describes the enterprise social networks developed within organizations with the aim of enhancing associations across geographic and hierarchical structures within an organization. They bring benefits such as provision of support to existing informal networks; enhance workers visibility and eases open office discussion with no hindrances.

In addition, the enterprise social networks improves the management of knowledge organizational wide. On the other hand, the disadvantages that arise with enterprise social networks involve the ineffectiveness of organizations where there is limited degree of trust between the management and the employees. Also, there is the risk on the risk of employees divulging into irrelevant work material.

The other social networking sites include the consumer social network site which is open to the public. They include; LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The benefits that accompany the consumer social networks within the organization augmented in the article include the use of the sites to compliment the business’ online presence and benefit search optimization on respective search engines.

The sites could be used to extend the geometric boundaries of single pieces of information to populate the variety of online networks. It is evident from the article that the negative effects accompanying consumer social networking sites is the insecurity of the network the organization is exposed to, heavy streaming and data causes immense losses to the business. In addition, inappropriate use of the consumer social site could be used as an avenue by a current or former employee of the business to damage the business’ reputation.

Overall, the writer emphasizes the immense extents to which social networking websites influence the business productivity with respect to marketing of products, effective collaboration across hierarchical and geographical and gathering of feedback from the consumer market. However, these benefits would be maximized if appropriate measures are undertaken to minimize the probable threats to the business and its effectiveness.                      

Reference

Awolusi, F. (2012). The Impacts of Social Networking Sites on Workplace Productivity. Journal of Technology, Management & Applied Engineering, 28(1).