{"id":20295,"date":"2017-03-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global2020prd.wpengine.com\/insights\/social-medias-role-in-virtual-teams\/"},"modified":"2020-05-21T13:01:24","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T13:01:24","slug":"social-medias-role-in-virtual-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/insights\/social-medias-role-in-virtual-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media&#8217;s role in virtual teams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have been doing some work with clients on the use of social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc\u2026) and its role in working in virtual teams.<\/p>\n<p>It is early days for these tools, BT are extending internal \u201cFacebook\u201d type applications to their 100,000 staff and this will be an interesting test bed. Despite the hype, concerns about \u201csocial notworking\u201d and the risks of continuous distraction at work, we think there are some real opportunities for using social media to solve particular challenges in virtual teams.<\/p>\n<p>We are not going to recycle the hype on social media in marketing, we will concentrate specifically on its use in virtual teams.<\/p>\n<p>We think that social media can play a valuable role in virtual teams in 3 key areas<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Making expertise visible<\/strong> \u2013 It can be hard to identify experts in\u00a0 large an complex organizations and in putting together virtual teams. Using social media, experts can have their own pages and spaces and, through the quality of their content, they can attract followers. An internal social network enables us to find and access experts and other specialists that we may need for our virtual team quickly in large organizations. We can also extend this network outside the core virtual team, even outide the organization \u2013 as an example why not join our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/groups\/Matrix-Management-2827035\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">LinkedIn group on Matrix Management<\/a> or subscribe to our YouTube channel <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/MyGlobalIntegration\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MyGlobalIntegration<\/a> which showcases some of our ideas.<\/li>\n<li>Virtual teams require <strong>setting up and maintaining low cost \u201cweak ties\u201d networks<\/strong>. Face to face contact can be infrequent in virtual teams and it is hard to build a network quickly and without high levels of travel and other communication costs. Social media allows us to connect quickly to a wide range of colleagues in a specific interest area or function. We may need these virtual team contacts infrequently so we do not want to invest heavily in being connected until there is a real opportunity to collaborate more closely.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Making opportunities to collaborate more closely visible<\/strong> \u2013 we can use short messages and updates to identify people, who can help with a particular problem or who are working on similar challenges to our own virtual teams. Tools like Twitter provide a low cost \u201cprompt\u201d to contact a virtual team colleague when something of real interest comes up. As an example, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/KevanHall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">follow us on Twitter<\/a> to see the latest developments in our field.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Enterprise applications like Yammer are overcoming some of the security concerns about using social media and could be useful low cost tools in virtual teams and organizations.<\/p>\n<p>Not all media will be suitable for commercial virtual teams, for example we do have a Facebook presence but are not really promoting it \u2013 we think Facebook is too informal for the kind of connections we are trying to develop<\/p>\n<p>These media can, to a certain extent, provide the virtual team \u201cwatercooler moments\u201d where people virtually \u201cbump into\u201d each other and spark ideas or opportunities to collaborate without the need for constant networking meetings.<\/p>\n<p>There is no doubt that social media&#8217;s potential for time wasting and distraction is a real concern for many virtual team leaders \u2013 as always it is not the tool that is the problem but how we use them.<\/p>\n<p>Delegates on our virtual team training programs already have access to these tools (via their mobile phones and PCs) and many are using them at home \u2013 so most organizations have the tools and the capability \u2013 but many are not using them.<\/p>\n<p>Marketing functions are already finding that the central push messages they used in the past are being supplanted by customer comment and social rankings. What will happen when something similar happens inside organizations \u2013 when people can choose whose information to \u201cfollow\u201d rather than passively consuming central communications messages? Will leaders be defined by how many followers they attract? It is going to be interesting!<\/p>\n<p>Check out an interactive graphic of our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.global-integration.com\/virtual-teams-training\/\">virtual teams learning path and training module contents<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!-- [if gte mso 9]><xml> <o_OfficeDocumentSettings> <o_TargetScreenSize>800x600<\/o_TargetScreenSize> <\/o_OfficeDocumentSettings> <\/xml><![endif]--><\/p>\n<p><!-- [if gte mso 10]>\n<mce_style><! \/* Style Definitions *\/ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:\"Table Normal\"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:\"\"; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:\"Times New Roman\",\"serif\";} --><\/p>\n<p><!--[endif]--><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social media in virtual teams<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":21358,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","type-blog","training-virtual-teams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.6 (Yoast SEO v27.6) - 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