Some of you might be wondering what the connection is between social media (aka social networking), business and positive psychology. The answer (or at least one of them) as far as I am concerned is performance. Both individiual and organisational performance depend on employee engagement and well-being, both of which can be increased through social networking.

As Will McInnes points out in this slide show (presented as part of Social Media Week), technological changes are unstoppable, so we’d be better off working out how we can use them effectively. Huge organisations like IBM have shown that it can be done – as this great blog from Casey Hibbard at the Social Media Examiner shows.

Of course there are headlines every day reporting the dark side of social networking, or about how many hours employees are wasting as they update their Facebook profiles. But technology can be used to change people’s behaviour for the better – McInnes gives the example of Toyota Prius drivers competing to better their MPG  ’score’ on the dashboard. You may remember that I touched on this subject with my posting on the so-called “Fun Theory” last year.

So if you want to engage your staff and take advantage of the social connections that people naturally make, think seriously about how social networking is being used in your organisation.

Here’s a link to my January contribution to Positive Psychology New Daily . Research just out suggests that how you spend your money affects your well-being, and that you’d be better off  (psychologically-speaking) by considering experiential purchases rather than material ones.  There are several reasons for this, for example, people tend to make unfavorable comparisons when they buy material goods, and the positive feeling you might get from buying them wears off very quickly. With experiential purchases, the feel-good factor lasts far longer.

Fortunately, if you’re a shopaholic, you may be able to fool youself into thinking about material purchases as if they were experiences, and in this way derive some longer-lasting benefit from them!

Image courtesy of Lauren Close

Here’s a link to my December contribution to Positive Psychology New Daily – given that 2010 is nearly here, it seemed appropriate to write about ‘future mental time travel’ (MTT). This particular research suggests that practising future MTT every day can increase your level of happiness if you focus on positive events.

If you can’t think of any positive future events to savour, even thinking about neutral events in the future can be beneficial, by reducing your level of anxiety. So as you start planning for 2010, why not try your own experiment, and see if future MTT works for you?

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome here and on the PPND site!

Image: thanks to lepiaf.geo

Just to update you all – Ilona and I are delighted to see that The Happiness Equation has been published in German. According to my MAPP colleagues, Drs Marina Fiedler and Lars Fend, there are two books on the topic of happiness and well-being in the top ten at the moment – let’s hope The Happiness Equation joins them!

Can you change people’s behaviour for the better by making tasks more enjoyable? Car manufacturer Volkswagen seems to think so - they’ve been running a competition looking for new designs or inventions which prove the ‘Fun Theory‘, i.e. that having fun is the easiest way to get people to do the right thing. Examples include  the bottle bank arcade machine,  the world’s deepest dustbin, and the piano staircase, which is my favourite.

I don’t know what the positive psychology theory is behind behaviour change and having fun (perhaps linked to Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions?) but on the basis it’s worked with the majority of kids since time began, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work with the majority of adults too.

The competition closes on 15th December, so if you want to enter your idea, and have the chance of winning 2500 euros, you need to get your skates on.

Thanks to Neil Ashley for the link