What are the issues involved with using social networks for professional development in the workplace?

Professional Development is essential. It is vital for every business and professional organization to increase the knowledge and skills of their employees. They should strive to enhance the quality of performance, to ensure an improvement on the personal and professional front. As professional development is needed for every business and every group of close working employees, it swings into Web 2.0, social networks and wikis. Today, you have businesses that operate globally. The CSU IT Service desk services lecturers and students over in Ontario, Canada, and Singapore, China and Malaysia. There is a high need in these situations for users to be brought closer together. To make communication swift, fast, accurate, and easy. Phones arent good because of time differences. Video Conferences arent good because of time differences. This leaves email, and possibly the use of social networks.

After researching with yellow poddies we came to the conclusion that social networks are detremental to professional development and to organizations. After tossing up the pro's and con's of having them we decided that with the current web 2.0 tools and a few new betas, that there was no good reason that outweighed all the bad ones. In short, it wasn't feasible.

Many of the tools don't fit in with the current social contraints or business constraints of an organistaion. The organization would have to be a learning organization and be willing to grow.

Some issues regarding social networks -

By using such a medium, you are actively promoting slang, and in-formal language/communications - the opposite of what is achieved with professional development. So in a bound and a leap, we are already having a detremental effect on Professional Development by making communication so casual as it's transferred. This would in turn ruin business ethic and respect. The only thing i cant think of here that it would be good for is geting to know your colleagues out of the confinements of the virtual and/or physical office.

Information may be lost while attempting to share it. For example in Twitter you can only use 160 characters per post. So if you use all your 160 characters, but havn't finished the sentence there is a loss of information.

Identity theft - social networks and online sites that are not set to private can easily be looked up by others, and those details used to create a fake account. This becomes extremely important in an organization where what you are selling is capital knowledge. You want to stay ahead of your competitors at all costs, and by posting and housing information anywhere other than your heavily guarded servers is a big no-no! You must also control who has access to certain pages and sites. You never give any one person more access than they are going to need.

Moderators of the group sites and pages will need to keep inviting or removing people from the group as employees start with the company or leave the company.

From what we saw and studied it seems professional development promotes the use of recreational behaviour, and because it is recreational behaviour during normal work hours, it is negatively effecting productivity as it cuts into your work day hours. By making yourself contactable via business social networks it can allow your professional life to interfere with your private life. People have been let go or penalised for posting things online that their bosses or similar dont agree with or like. The risk that you will think something is ok to say, but your boss disagrees is high.

There is huge risk that things can be mis-communicated. Such that three people can read one sentence and get three different things out of it. As you could have colleagues from all around the globe it is also important you articulate what you say with care so you do not accidentally offend someone's culture, religion or looks.

Yellow group and i thought that maybe some of the new web 2.o tools (such as googlewave) coming out would be better used for professional development, or even smart conferencing software where you can share desktops, but for now, professional development should steer clear of social networking sites.