That said, I have two problems with the approach itself. The first is that you’re making fun of senior management when you imply that they’re clueless “morons” who don’t understand social media. While it’s well and good to use the reductio ad absurdum technique on the objections that they raise against using social media at work, you risk ticking them off it you at any point imply that they themselves are idiots.

The second is that, in the real world, senior management might not take too kindly to your essentially blackmailing them into getting social media unblocked. The blackmail being that you are threatening to expose them as managers who don’t listen to what everyone else in the company agrees with if they don’t agree to your terms and unblock social media sites.

In my opinion, to do things this way you either need to be part of the senior management itself or you need to have the strong support of at least one influential senior manager. If not, you need to have senior management involved at each stage of this process.

Personally, I’d move a lot slower and would first attempt to get key influencers excited about, and ideally heavily involved in, social media. These influencers would be at different levels and in different departments within the company. Only once that was accomplished would I move to the lunchtime sessions stage.

In general, though, it’s a good strategy to adopt because, ultimately, social media use comes from the ground-up. And if it doesn’t come from the ground-up it doesn’t often work and rarely does it sustain itself over a longer period of time.

Scott: You’re right, the whole definition of work is changing; particularly in post-industrial or service economies. And an employee’s value-add can be quite difficult to quantify when you’re still (a) measuring only their productivity or (b) using how busy they are between the hours of 9am and 5pm as a proxy for how much work they’re doing. Unfortunately, paradigm shifts necessarily take time. Fortunately, we have plenty of Web Workers out there who are actively shifting perceptions of what ‘work’ is so it might not take as long as one would pessimistically predict.

Carl: Part of the problem is about the traditional separation of social life and work life. Somewhat enlightened companies do things like provide flexible working hours and let your social life meet with your work life every now and then. They also do things like discourage working more than 40 hours a week so you can have a good “work-life balance”.

More enlightened companies go a step further and are flexible both about your work timings and your physical location when you do work (i.e. they’re comfortable with the concept of Web Workers and with the use of social media). Even more enlightened companies recognize that you have two social lives: one outside of work and one at work. These companies then take steps to nurture both of those and provide ample opportunity for the two to overlap (sometimes by actively engaging both social lives using social media).

Is this more about being allowed to bring your social life and norms into the workplace? As opposed to having work norms and social norms separately. Therefore providing a means for work to “leak” into non-work time and vice-versa?

TWIT spoke very briefly about this in their recent episode (http://twit.tv/189 right at the end).

Imagine the “lost productivity” in blocking web sites or approving annual leave. This would all be eliminated once the salary paradigm has shifted.

I recall reading a number of years ago that knowledge workers do tend to need breaks during the day. There is no way that a person can “work” consistently from 9-5 and only take mental breaks during lunch.

What better way to use this time getting involved in the new technologies and “social outlets” that might actually be useful for the company down the track.