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Experts warn of the dark side of enterprise 2.0

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference , you'd expect to hear people extolling the benefits of using social media tools at a company, but you might not expect to hear about the dark side.

And there is a dark side that ranges from the obvious -- information overload and employee burnout -- to issues that might be a lless obvious -- such as an increased feeling of isolation and letting the "loud talkers" assume a position of expert voice.

"Sometimes you just have to turn all that crap off," Greg Lowe, social media strategist at Alcatel-Lucent, told an early morning keynote audience today. "You've got to unplug yourself. I'm in social media and my ADD is struggling to keep up. Sometimes when I go to a coffee shop, I leave my computer and phone at home. I bring a notepad and maybe a book."

Lowe and Kathleen Culver, a transformation architect also at Alcatel-Lucent, said there are great advantages for any company using enterprise 2.0 technologies, including social collaboration platforms, microblogs and wikis. These technologies can increase productivity and facilitate greater collaboration with employees in far-flung offices.

However, as with most anything, there's a downside.

And with enterprise 2.0, the downside tends to involve information and time overload.

"This spigot of access of anywhere, anytime, anybody can flood our free time," Culver said. "The problem is that with these new forums and ways of interacting, there's a strong desire to be responsive. This need to respond doesn't just happen in the forum of your work day. It's happening 24/7. It means that we're potentially on all the time."

And that constant attention to our gadgets, to the stream of social updates and work-related posts and tweets can keep people from relaxing their brains.

"We're losing our downtime," added Culver. "So we're working the BlackBerry at the dinner table. We're sending out tweets. We're invading our play time. What they're finding about play, whether it's tennis or Sudoku, is you're taking work problems out of the context of work. You're no longer getting that time away from work ... It's not just the fact that you're getting all of these messages, it's the unpredictability of it. The problem is going to be burnout."