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Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast, I'm Allison Beard. I'm here today with Alexandra Samuel, a technology

researcher, writer, and strategist and the author of Work Smarter with Social

Media, as well as an article in this month's magazine conquering digital distraction.

Alex thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks so much for inviting me.

So I know you've been thinking about the impact of the internet on the workplace

for a very long time.

Tell me how you got started.

Well, my graduation in political science was on activism, political computer hacking.

But what it was really about is what makes people participate online.

And it turned out that in 2004, when I finished, the real place people cared about how do you

get people to participate online was in this emergent world of what we now call social media.

And I ended up kind of accidentally starting what you would now call a social media agency

to help organizations think about how they could make use of this new phenomenon of blogging and

online community platforms and then later Facebook and Twitter as a way of engaging their

supporters, engaging their customers and really moving from a broadcast model of online

communication to a conversational model. And then more recently for

HBR you started writing about the challenges that we face when dealing with the digital

overload. So what challenges have you personally faced and what challenges do you see

with your clients and the companies you work with?

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