China Unicom Open Australia Operation

In the past, people used to convey information in work by meetings or events. With the development of technology, more and more electronic communication methods are introduced into work, and they become popular due to its high efficiency and convenience. Common electronic communication people known include emails and messages. In the recent year, social media take its role in communication at work. Although enterprise application of a new technology always lags behind individual application, but using social media in large scale to facilitate company process, publicize information was hard to imagine in the past (as cited in Cao, 2012). Nowadays, many big company applied social media into their daily communication in work. For example, Skeels and Grudin (as cited in Cao, 2012) found that social network sites have a wide application in workplace. In Microsoft, One-third of employees are in the LinkedIn and 36% are in the Facebook company work.

When it comes to social media, most people will think of enlarging friend circle. Take skype as example, people usually used it for video chat and video call services. But in 2012, 9 years after it was founded, Microsoft announced that skype in the workplace (SITW) will launched, and around 500 businesses get involved for six-month beta trial (Levine,2012). The tendency of social media in work communication is strong because it can bring a more convenient, efficient and effective communication channel.

For the majority of companies, routine meeting, held monthly or weekly, is necessary. Traditional meeting gathers several people together, and those who attend the meeting need to spread the information down to other employees. Undoubtedly, this channel is very slow. It needs time to let everyone know about. However, the latency in information is fatal in company, especially for customer-oriented company. Social media can work well in replacing traditional conference by holding conference calls or videos, which means all employees from different regions can have an official talk together.  Video conferences enrich the communication channels as well as increasing engagement with employees. Peter Quirk, as a project manager in EMC, he applies social media technology in monthly meeting with employees through video conference. Many employees hence save travel expenses and time (Robbins,2011).

Since 1971, the first instant message came out. Email has been used in work for dozens of years. We cannot deny that email is important and useful in formal correspondence. However, not all communication is formal, company also needs informal communication, where email cannot be an appropriate tool comparing to instant message and text messages. For simple notification, like one-line or two-line message, text message will be a better choice, since people can check their text message at anywhere and anytime easily. Someone may concern that text message is too personal, employees may mix with personal messages and professional messages. Emerging messages in workplace can reassure them and it already took one place in work communication, such as Yammer and Chatter(Savitz,2011). These two softwares allow people to open group for project, share ideas, questions as well as updates with coworkers.

Enterprise application of social media could build a Communication is the activity we do most at work, the top one resource of interpersonal conflict in the workplace is lack of communication.

Coins have two sides. Although the working efficiency has improved when social media have been increasingly adopted in the workplace, it comes along with problem that Leader should be aware of.

Noise is anything that is introduced into message that wasn’t included by sender, it includes semantic, psychological and cultural perspective (Robbins,2011). This situation gets even worse especially when worker use social media as the medium of communication. People usually sent text in random manner and will not think twice before sending it, if it contains ambiguous word, sender hardly notice it. And without face-to-face communication, misunderstanding will appear.  If there is conflict arising from misunderstanding, leaders need to be sensitive to it and find common goal among conflicting groups to break the ice.

Monitoring employee website connection is necessary. It both ensure employees do not use working time on personal issue and for information security. Since social media is used in both individual applications and enterprise applications, employees may handle with personal issue even when they are at work. From 2009 to 2011, employees have been disciplined for activities on Social media are increase to 24% from 10% (Dutta,2010). In order to take a control on employee web activity, many organizations develop their own social networking system to avoid employees waste working time. Information security is a huge concern for every company. According to Merril Lynch survey, 52 percentage leaks of company information are found (Dutta,2010). The information leaking happens with virus and hackers. Continuous monitoring should alleviate the problem to some extent.