Last week, one of the blogs I read regularly (and one we liked enough to put on our blogroll),  Gruntled Employees by Jay Shepherd, posted:

Five reasons Twitterers make better employees

In this post, Jay outlines why banning Twitter from the workplace is not a good idea and how it can, in fact, be better for your company to hire workers who “get” Twitter than not.

From Jay Shepherd’s post about Twitter and Workers:

“Tworkers are interested in being part of a community, one they help build. They care about people, and they’re sharing and compassionate.”

The comments that follow the post are equally interesting and illuminating. The big question I hear a lot seems to be should we ban Twitter and social media from the workplace and many seem to think yes, that it is only a waste of time. While that can be argued, Jay’s post at least makes some good points about the positive qualities of an active Twitter personality.

No doubt, there are Shiftboard customers who use Twitter and many who don’t. But that isn’t the point, really, of this post.

The point is how do you create a workplace that uses the enthusiasm and energy people have for social media (which is increasingly part of the fabric of our digital, and not-so-digital, lives). If you run a business that has customers or volunteers, how do you connect with them? I’ve seen quiet little case studies from SaaS companies like Shiftboard to bakeries that are successfully using Twitter to stay in contact with their customer base, to drive traffic to their website, and to spread the word about what they are doing.

Who does all that? Employees and Volunteers…

–TJ M.

http://www.shiftboard.com

http://blog.shiftboard.com

Twitter ID to follow…