Sean, thanks for your comment.

A few questions:

1. Which social sites/networks do you belong to?

2. Where do you sit on the career totem pole?

3. What is your job function and/or sector?

(Seriously, I’d like to hear back from you)

Now to really respond:

Do I think Social Media is as essential to my existence as breathing? NO, but it is highly important. I chose breathing to convey how important this issue is to me (and I imagine a few other people in my group).

I don’t think your example really applies because you immediately assume that there is no company benefit from me being engaged on these sites. By banning these social sites, companies are cutting people off from our networks, which can be highly valuable in certain circumstances.

I ask what your job function is because I work in PR. With my job, your networks of personal friends, co-workers, journalists, thought leaders, and old buddies from school are VERY IMPORTANT. I call on these people with whom I chat, tweet, email, friend, follow and occasionally poke regularly to discuss an “innovation” or “workflow problem” that I may have identified.

If I don’t engage and foster relationships with great people who know things and know other great people who know even more, I would be cut off from a vast source of information.

To address the twitter comment specifically, are you on twitter?

If you are, I’m not sure that you’re using it effectively. I’ve picked up AND shared so much information about new online tools, guides and great events on Twitter. Several times when searching for specific data, I’ve been steered in the right direction by people on twitter and linkedin who were once in my position. Here’s the best part: They were so helpful it SAVED TIME, and I was able to share my new info and tools with co-workers so that we could spend time “doing more than our basic assignments.”

The last piece of your comment is truly unsettling. Are you dealing with a slacker and associating them with a whole generation of workers?

Sean, give me a break. Are you really that threatened and disgruntled?

I really would appreciate a response. Thanks, Sean.

James, for the record, I don't disagree that social media has business merit when leveraged properly. I blog and I'm on LinkedIn; where I work, the 60-something vice president has a blog on our extranet for discussing business- and industry-related information, and we use internal wikis to manage information and keep it current.

It's possible that I missed your point, but your article compares social media to breathing. You imply that Facebook and Twitter are the same as LinkedIn. And you say things like, "I am a firm believer in the idea that all that matters is that the work gets done on time and done well. Outside of that, what else matters?"

In your response to my comment, you start to make a case for the advantages of social media, and again, I don't categorically disagree with you. But if you're interested in articulating this interest to employers, please do yourself a favor: don't compare it to breathing. It's melodramatic and undermines your position. Demonstrate the advantages of social media. Describe a problem you've solved better, quicker, faster thanks to social media. Prove the ROI. You might change some minds that way.

James,

I love this conversation you are having. I do believe that Twitter and Facebook have similiar values to LinkedIn. If you are caught up throwing sheep at your friends, yea its a time waster. But if you are listening to the conversations, posting great notes, finding inspiration and being productive, then yea, sit on Facebook all day long.

The people you run across online can be entirely different from those in your real life. Why not have a quick conversation with them, check out a link they throw up on Twitter and then work with them to Digg a story to the front page and get that ROI that Sean is talking about.

Social Media is not like breathing in the sense that I would die from lack of Twitter usage, but it is the lifeline of my business, keeping in touch with clients and branching out to talk to and touch more people.

If you don't like to interact, then this isn't the world for you!

I think its also important to point out that James references the oxygen/breathing concept from another well noted author and book on social media in business. This isn't his idea persay but he is expounding upon the idea.

I really think as time goes, these technologies will definitely become more important in the workplace. Just like any other technology that gets integrated into the workplace (the Internets aka the series of tubes), there will need to be some clearly defined boundaries. Plenty of times I have created relationships with people because of these social sites that have given my organization more exposure and brought along great ideas.

Great thoughts James :D

While Social media is considered vital to PR and Marketing, it's a waste to Manufacturing and Engineering.

No one running advanced machine tools needs to be on Facebook and any engineer doing Twitter while working could be passing along proprietary information. It's happened before, and he's doing time for corporate espionage.

Amy- Thanks for the article.

As far as the leaking of secrets go, I could do that right here right now. I could do it on the phone. I could blog about anonymously from home. That argument I find hard to accept.

I've heard the bandwidth and security argument before, and I hope it's something that gets resolved soon. Don't want to cause issues there.

jrandom42 - I'm with you on the engineering part. Not everything's not for everyone. Thanks for commenting.