The Evolving Role of Social Media

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 39-41

39

The Evolving Role

of Social Media

By its very nature, collaboration is a social activity. Over the

last ten years, social media and social networking services

have dramatically changed the landscape for collaboration

tools and technologies, but not in the ways you expect. When

we wrote the first edition of this book, we debated about

whether to include a chapter on the social media tools of the

day, but decided that they were too nascent and barely used

by the legal profession. Much has changed since that time.

As we write this chapter, Facebook has more than two bil-

lion users, many of whom use it every day and, in most cases,

by using the Facebook mobile app on a smartphone. LinkedIn

has more than five hundred million users. Twitter has hundreds

of millions of users, as do many other social media platforms.

We initially thought that social media platforms also were

ideal as collaboration platforms. The feature set for collabora-

tion can definitely be found in your average social media tool—

groups, file sharing, messaging, video and more. However,

the popularity of social media platforms moved us in slightly

different directions.

First, social media brought smartphones and mobile

apps into play as collaboration technologies. Nowadays, it is

impossible to see how a collaboration tool or platform can be

successful without an app that lets users access it via their

smartphone or tablet. Along with cloud computing, mobile

apps support the anytime, anywhere nature of collaboration

and the demands of people who want to work together.

Second, rather than collaboration moving into social

media platforms, social media functionality has moved into

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