Many businesses have harnessed powerful social media tools to recruit top talent, engage their customers, and create excitement in the marketplace. But, as GigaOM recently reported, at least two observers suggest that there is a danger of overwhelming employees with so much information that they shy away from using those tools and return to less efficient work flows.

At GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco in December, Dave Hersh, chairman of Jive Software, which sells social business software, and Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management at Google, suggested several considerations that companies should evaluate to ensure their social media efforts don’t disintegrate from within:

• Employees consume social media outside the workplace and expect satisfying user experiences with social media in the workplace. Hersh mentioned that businesses of the future may want to hire a “chief experience officer” to make sure this occurs.
• Employees need assistance in organizing and prioritizing the information that inundates them as a result of the use of social media tools they use at work. Horowitz pointed to Google’s priority inbox as an example of a technology that can help employees manage large amounts of information.
• Employers that don’t monitor the quality of their employees’ user experiences with the social media tools the company has chosen to use or help them to focus on the information they need to do their jobs may find themselves with valuable but dissatisfied employees who lose focus, become disillusioned, or create problems in the workplace.

Businesses that use social media tools extensively, or that are only considering whether to do so, should:

• Evaluate how to structure their workflows better to optimize the use of those tools;
• Determine what training efforts they are providing or will provide to employees, not only to use those tools but to help them efficiently process information.
• Plan how to ensure that the social media experience their employees are having is interesting enough to keep those employees engaged in and using them.