Social WORKING or NETWORKING???

I happened to come across an interesting subject called “Social Working” and I must say it was gripping enough for me to spend some of my time to go through it and also read the comments.And, being Twitter the center of discussion, I couldn’t help but start TWEET on it.

For me, social working is working with “like-minded” people with whom we share common interests and there is a mutual benefit.Simple. So, if I socialise with my team, that’s because probably our objective and work environment is common. If “x” person visits my blog and follow me, that means I and those “X” persons share something in common, might be our interestes, style of writing or a mere liking for me. Social Working is beneficial when information in any form reaches between the members uninterrupted and there is no loss of information.

Taking the discussion to the next level, do Ch1blogs and Twitter fulfills it?? CH1blogs surely does it. But, I have my reservations on Twitter. Though being a tech savvy and having used numerous social networking sites like facebook, orkut, twitter never seemed to attract my attention and there are reasons for it.

My observation on Twitter says that its an application only for certain amount of people with a certain purpose to fulfill. So, if today, Priyanka Chopra is using Twitter and has already gathered 20,000 fans, then it’s not at all a shock for me. For a celebrity like her, her fans would be interested to know her min by min updates.Twitter is a great advertising tool.So, for budding entrepreneurs and people who share knowledge, it’s a great place for advertisements and notifications.

Though I am not quite aware of the statistics of Twitter, but how many of the people would have time to update it frequently except when we are enjoying our holidays and hooked up to a computer or lazying around in office and tweeting with unknown people? Why would I like to allow some unknown people to follow me when I am not sure about their background or not aware whether we share some interests or not. I am sure TWITTER is not a tool to befriend anyone. May be it would work in a corporate environment where people within same platform would like to listen min by min update of their team members but again here too, why would people from other team would like to know about the update of some other person in some other team until and unless they share some common interest.

Twitter is a great concept but definitely not an answer to “Social Working” or “Social Networking”. Social Networking happens when socialization happens with a certain amount of interdependency which Twitter fails to fulfill.

Social Working or Networking is successful when the correct person sends correct information and it flows to the correct person. And, if there is a mismatch and these three are not in sync, then the whole idea of social working or networking fails.It’s just not the information flow but also the visibility of information which is important. And, there is always a chance to block and ignore a person if you do not want to be socially connected to that person.

So, are we socially on the right path??