Social Media Assigment Reflection on Collaboration

¶ … Collaboration The wiki continues to be an important collaborative tool in the learning process. Thanks to the prompt peers' feedback, active learning was enhanced and promoted -- leading to a motivating learning environment. In essence, is by way of collaborating with my colleagues that I got motivated and, hence, involved myself more in the learning process. We essentially turned each other into experts. This is particularly the case given that the posts written by my colleagues were accessible to every person and, hence, formed a pool of opinions.

I could say that by reading my colleague's posts, I was able to not only improve my research writing skills, but my communication and writing skills also got a significant boost. By collaborating with others, we were able to not only explore but also share information. The learning curve was surely lessened. This has been an opportunity for me to appreciate my colleagues and their contributions to the learning process. Collectively we have a sense of ownership towards the learning process.

This collaborative effort enabled us to develop out-of-the-box thinking capabilities and gain a broader perspective of various issues. Other people's viewpoints are important as they shape our own opinions and open our minds to new ideas and possibilities. So far, I have been able acquire a whole lot of valuable information with regard to the utilization of social media in an organizational setting. I learnt that social media platforms like twitter Facebook, etc. can have a positive impact on an organization's well-being and future success.

The challenge, however, is how to bring together an entity's social media strategies and its objectives, while at the same time ensuring that employees do not misuse the same (Ford and Green, 2013). I learnt that while there are benefits associated with social media use in an organization, there are also some inherent risks that come with the same. At first instance, it may seem reasonable for organizations to ban the use of social media at the workplace.

As a matter of fact, at the beginning of this exercise, I was of the opinion that social media use at the workplace had a negative impact on production. Social media could come in handy in the conduction of market research, hiring of employees, dissemination of info, brand promotion, sales targeting, etc. Banning its utilization at the workplace does not, therefore, seem reasonable.

While there are legal risks associated with its usage, organizations must find a way of regulating the use of social media while at the same time maximizing its benefits (Christakis and Fowler, 2009). There are plenty of opportunities for misuse of social media in the organizational setting.

Here are some: An employee tweets this in their tweeter handle -- "big announcement tomorrow - sad!!! It has been a rough year but I am confident next year will be better." Shareholders of the company interpret this to mean that the company has made a huge loss and dump their stock. An employee posts on their timeline about a bad encounter with a supplier on their Facebook timeline -- "stressful day.