back to article Want your social media to swing? First, get the staff onboard

Social networking clearly has the potential to totally change the way we work, especially in large or widely dispersed organisations. It might actually allow companies to see our natural inclination to share information (the technical term is “gossip”) as a business tool, rather than a drain on company time. However, more so …

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  1. Pirate Peter

    and how do you stop your competitors using the information against you

    the more information you put on social media, the more leaks out for your competitors to use against you

    unless you have closed groups with everything locked down you provide head hunters, competitors and every man and his dog access to your skill base and internal information

    putting anything other than marketing information of social media is commercial suicide

    imagine if you had uploaded a number of PR photos onto something like instagram, you then find out they have sold your images to a competitor because they changed the T'c and C's

    the company i work for tried something similar with a closed system which was outsourced so the management could trawl it for skills etc, when asked if we had to put all details in we were told it was not compulsory so 90+% put just the minimum name and address in

    the data was offshore with no safeharbour agreement and outside EU DPA area, sorry not going there and HR could not answer questions on data security, at which point BIG fail

    the only people interested in these sort of things are those with a vested interest in getting their hands on your personal data

    1. Mike Flugennock
      FAIL

      Re: and how do you stop your competitors using the information against you

      Never mind that -- how do the employees shanghai'ed into being "social" keep their own company from using profile informatton against them?

      This has nothing to do with "collaboration". This creepy-ass outfit just wants to put a human face on good old-fashioned snooping.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Meh

      Re: and how do you @Pirate Pete

      Some very good points, but there is (remarkably enough) a rising expectation amongst a large segment of customers that the companies they use should interact via Twitter and Facebook. Nope, I wouldn't discuss my energy/telecoms/shopping bill on a public site, but there are plenty of people who do want to, and expect their supplier to enable that.

      In that context, you need to have a clear policy as to who engages on social media on behalf of the company, what they can and cannot say. No different to a typical IT AUP, the only difference being that initial expectations are that social media is somehow unregulated. Might be unregulated for customers, but for employees they (on a designated basis) use it during work time, as a work tool. They get paid, they follow the rules. Outside of work what they do is (or should be) their business, and both they and employers need to think through one simple issue: Outside of work, should I be able to express myself freely on social media AND let on who I work for?

      My view is that on social media outside of work, the rule is "don't say you work for us". That's what most of us commentards do, all that's needed is the less astute to be instructed?

  2. Mike Flugennock
    Thumb Down

    "Getting groups to collaborate"?

    Beating them into submission, more like...

    “Publishing houses are not noted for their high technology adoption rates,” he says. “But newspaper publisher Archant wanted to get more staff to use the Socialcast platform, so CEO Adrian Jeakings declared one Friday afternoon to be Profile Day.”

    Jeakings asked everyone to down tools and spend the afternoon filling in their personal profiles and subscribing to streams that seemed interesting to them. He even hired a photographer to come in and take casual shots of staff that they could upload to their pages...

    Eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww.

  3. Mike Timbers

    Social enterprise is not Facebook/Twitter

    The Social Enterprise is not about using a Facebook site or Twitter for communicating internally. This is about using products like Yammer or Chatter to have a private internal social networking capability to allow an easy "stream of consciousness" update on what people are working on, what they have seen elsewhere that's relevant to work, what they need to know but don't know where or who to ask. It solves one of the problems that most companies have of carp intranet sites that are still Web 1.0 with no investment or interaction. Social Enterprises relocate communication from email (which is or should be to a closed group and therefore non-inclusive) to a noticeboard-type approach where anyone can ask a question or publish something interesting to anyone who wants to answer it or know about it.

    It's not about publishing the pictures of who you did last night! And it's not spying.

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