I think it’s a fair question, and one I raised in my second podcast for GreenNurture.

If you only read the tweets and sites that conform to your interest, you’d miss the contra views. As a writer, and practitioner, I keep an eye on those other points of view. (I get the usual snarky comment: “I don’t want to hear that someone’s having carrots for lunch”)

And there are mixed reviews pouring in every week about what social media is doing to employee productivity, with millions of employees taking to Facebook, Twitter and online games.

Here are a few recent reports:

• Social Media costs British industry  £6.5 billion per year (!)
• Web 2.0 technologies assist companies in knowledge capture and collaboration
• A Pew Research study on collaborators, networkers and the mobile

I put the productivity gains question to Derrick Mains CEO of GreenNurture to find out what a CEO –who tweets much more than I– has to say. Mains has two words to describe its value: frontline intelligence. To him it’s a remake of that old static engagement tool –the suggestion box.

“Social media simply blew the sides of the suggestion box,” he says.

On this podcast Mains talks of how organizations that frown on online social activity are missing out on frontline intelligence.

Download the podcast here.