SmallBusinessNewz

Today I wanted to share an interesting video from Nokia's Ideas Project website, where Adina levin, VP Products and co-founder of Socialtext talks about social media as it relates to productivity and directions the technologies need to go in to become more useful to business. Do you think social media can contribute to productivity? Comment here.

She says that these days, we are still in the early walled garden days for social networks. She compares it to the Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL days. She says this will fade away.

In fact, I would suggest that it already is fading away thanks to open APIs that allow third-party apps to integrate different services together. Take for example an app like TweetDeck. This allows the user to control their Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook accounts from one centralized location, making each easier to manage.

Levin talks about social media as a helpful business tool, giving an example of a company where someone has fixed some kind of bug. Social media would be a helpful, productive means for receiving an update on that fix, and then sharing that information with customers that it would affect.

Social networks provide a comfortable setting where you can take that piece of business data and combine it with a social interaction and turn it into a successful business transaction.

Levin thinks a lot of the things we see in politics with regards to social media use will likely be implemented more and more into business environments.