Social Media
In broad terms, social media is online technology for social interaction (Carpenter et al., 2018). However, people see the term 'social media' in two different ways. The first group of people think of the public social media websites used for networking. While, the others think of technologies that create the social media websites.
"A technology that affords 'scalable sociality'. By this we mean that social media provides greater control in communication over both the degree of privacy and size of group, when compared with previous forms of communications media."
(UCL, 2018)
“websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or participate in social networking”
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2018)
Internet was introduced to the public in 1989 (Waring, 2018). However, the big boom came in a few years later. But at this time there was still no social media. Social media was presented when the Web 2.0 was designed also known as the 'social web' (Fuchs, 2011). It was designed to give users the option of interaction and dialogue. Martin et al. (2013) said that this was an essential shift for man communication.
Nonetheless, when speaking about social media for employee voice the enterprise social networks should be mentioned. Those are internal social media platforms such as "Yammer, Jive, Socialtext etc." (ACAS, 2016) they connect functions of internal and external social networks. This means, people have the same possibilities but only within a specific group of people, such as a company. Social media are not only used for employee voice. They are used throughout the whole employee life cycle, in:
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Career development
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Job induction
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Recruitment and selection
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Managing of projects and performance
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Reward and recognition
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Internal and external communication
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Training and learning...
"We don't have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it"
Erik Qualman
Social media is important driver for innovation, collaboration and insight. Surowiecki's research (2004) presents that a group of people makes better decisions and shows more intelligence than individuals. This is known as 'the wisdom of crowds'. Employees are those who drive the business because they have the knowledge of the organisation. They work on the front line and communicate daily with customers. Therefore, they can identify the problems and the improvements needed. Thus, the social media is the perfect channel to share this knowledge and implement those ideas.
