Study: People That Think Social Media Helps Their Work Are Probably Wrong

RichDiesal writes: "In an upcoming special issue of Social Science Computer Review, researchers set out to understand how people actually use social media while at work and how it affects their job performance. By polling workers across 17 industries, they identified 8 broad ways that people use social media that they believe help their work, and 9 broad ways that people use social media that they believe harm their work. Although the harmful social media behaviors were related to decreased job performance, the beneficial social media behaviors were unrelated to job performance. In short, wasting time on social media hurts you, but trying to use social media to improve your work probably doesn't actually help."

Comments

Hmm..

[Darinbob]

My first thought here was "well.. duh!"
Maybe I'm biased not doing a lot of this stuff, but I just can't see any sort of job where social media helps except for jobs that are involved with social media (marketing, customer interactions, etc).

Next up, will they have the study showing that Slashdot usage is detrimental to work performance?
(at least I was sure usenet was a net positive because it was often the only place to get to get real answers to tough questions, which really has no replacement today)

Re:Hmm..

[RichDiesal]

The people participating in the study thought these behaviors would help their job performance.... communicating with customers, reaching out to new customers, participating in an online work community, communicating with coworkers, gathering information from colleagues, asking friends/coworkers/family for help solving a work problem, and using social media as a technical solution (e.g. transferring a file from one computer to another). On the surface, it looks like these things would help in many jobs. But from the data, they were unassociated with better work performance.

Re:Hmm..

[kelemvor4]

My first thought here was "well.. duh!" Maybe I'm biased not doing a lot of this stuff, but I just can't see any sort of job where social media helps except for jobs that are involved with social media (marketing, customer interactions, etc).

Next up, will they have the study showing that Slashdot usage is detrimental to work performance? (at least I was sure usenet was a net positive because it was often the only place to get to get real answers to tough questions, which really has no replacement today)

Message boards have mostly replaced usenet these days. Unfortunately, they're a bit more fragmented. You have to find a message board pertaining to the topic you're interested.

Re:Hmm..

[symes]

I agree that the usual suspects, Facebook, Twitter and so on do very little. However, I have recently set up an account on Researchgate - a platform specifically for scientists to share their work, and have been modestly surprised. I have been able to connect with researchers, particularly more junior ones who I would not usually come across, and their work. In so doing I've found some very good studies in my area that I didn't know about.

Re:Hmm..

[nmr_andrew]

Glad to hear you find Researchgate useful for your work.

Around here, though, someone set up a Researchgate account and added a couple of publications to their profile. Researchgate then took the "initiative" to send all coauthors invitations to join. Instead of a somewhat spammy message to the effect of "so-and-so has joined Researchgate; we think you might want to check us out", the message was a much more sleazy "so-and-so has invited you to join him/her on Researchgate". Just want the /. crowd to be aware of the sort of tactics Researchgate is using to try to build their member list.

Really... Facebooking doesn't help productivity!?

[the_skywise]

I RTFA but I don't see what they're counting as social media? Are we including things like IM and EMail or collaborative development products like web based agile?
Or did they just count Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

I smell an Ig nobel!

[elsuperjefe]

Ladies and Gentlemen we have a new front runner for this year's Ig Nobel prize awards --El

doing it wrong

[zlives]

Thats because they are doing it wrong, what they need is the Oculus Rift VR FB experience.

Re:Really... Facebooking doesn't help productivity

[RichDiesal]

It's any social media use at all while at work. One of the dimensions of "good" behaviors was participating in an online work community. Presumably, most people would not think that using Facebook would help their job performance, so they would not report that as "good".

Some "good" example survey items linked in the article:
I request help from people on social media when I am having trouble solving a problem at work.
I communicate with existing customers or clients via social media.
When someone posts something negative about our organization or its employees on social media, I try to do something about it.

It's Called Cyber Loafing

[RudyHartmann]

Social media doesn't do diddly squat for 98% of the world at work.

Re:It's Called Cyber Loafing

[kelemvor4]

Social media doesn't do diddly squat for 98% of the world at work.

Guess what, it doesn't do much good for 98% of the world not at work.

Re:Twitter

[laffer1]

I second this. As a software developer, I deal with weird issues with vendor products I have to support and extend. I've had great luck communicating with their product support folks via twitter. It literally saves hours waiting for email responses.

We also use Google Plus to communicate at work through a private community. It's actually scheduled to replace a good part of our current intranet site. It's been a lot quicker for us to just use that rather than maintain the custom solution we were using. We also can search it effectively and the teams have been good about tracking it as we use a full google stack at work (Gmail, drive, etc) so they get the notifications regularly.

Like any tools, it depends on how you use them.

Re:Twitter

[Imagix]

communicating with their product support folks via twitter. It literally saves hours waiting for email responses

Then the vendor is literally incompetent. There is _no_ reason why email should take hours to get a response.