Do private data stay private ?

Dawn Foster has written a post about privacy and how we can’t assume it means shared information is kept private, the post is worth reading: Online Privacy is an Illusion. The observations are articular relevant to consider after Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Your actions talks louder than your careful crafted message

Google has now enabled the inclusion of real-time data in it’s searches. It will be interesting to see if this lead to companies being better at looking after their reputation in the on-line sphere. It is not uncommon for service problems to be flagged up at twitter and it should scare a company to know bad customer experience could come up in the search results next to careful crafted web pages with the official company message.

Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com is quoted for saying:

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends.
If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

Soon, 6000 people could see it if told to one person at an open social network.

Updated 18 Feb 2010

Share personal information to create credibility?

A study by professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase found Twitter is 80% “Meformers” and 20% Informers but interesting to read the comments to a  blog post about the study, several of the comments are along the lines of getting to know the person by the shared personal (me) information give credibility (trust) to other information shared.

I was yesterday evening doing a bit of photo editing on photos for the kids web pages – will sharing this give credibility to my blogs posts ?

For engaged employees: “Communicate with” or “Communicate to”

Carolyn Ray, vice-president of employee engagement at National Public Relations in Toronto find a shift is happening in the workplace communication, from monologue to dialogue – from communicating to, to communicating with.

Companies using social media to engage employees in more meaningful dialogue see  improved efficiency, collaboration and engagement. The whole article can be read in The Globe and Mail.

Do you share ?

Pete Cashmore, Mashable CEO, has said: “not sharing means not existing“

I find this quote thought provoking, so I thought I would share it with you blog readers (even I have shared it at other media already). I guess being invisible by not sharing is a risk in a world where interaction via social media becomes more and more common both in the work place and outside the work place.

Sharing is certainly essential for participating in a social media enable world.

No talking, please?

Carol Rozwell, Peter Sondergaard and Paul Proctor argued at the Gartner Symposium for not allowing corporate computing departments to block social networking and that security teams shouldn’t lock down communications with the outside world.

A summery of the session is posted here. It is interesting to read the comments left at the blog post, few of them show much understanding of the benefits of social network or worse, the benefit of communication and interaction. Talk about social network in a corporate settings often results in arguments for high level of managerial control over employee work practices and very little focus on the outcome of the work. This is probably the correct approach in certain work situations, but I struggle to see how knowledge based jobs, which more and more jobs are, can benefit from a ban on tools that facilitate communication and interaction with other people. Talking about innovation but at the same time preventing people from using social networks seems very unlinked up.

I think much of the problems comes from the assumption that social network is only about talking about what people did over the weekened but a corporate use of social network is much more about sharing knowledge, disucssing ideas and a tool to  work across orgational boundaries.

Carol Rozwell expands on her view in a post here. What is your view ?

Myths about Social Media bursted

Just read “Top 5 Social Media Myths“, interesting research from MIT shows 40% of employees productivity is explained by the amount of communication they have with others. Employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues.

Social networks = email 2.0, will enterprise sticks to email 1.0 ?

Darren Waters, Technology editor, BBC writes how Social networks are the new e-mail , I find one of his observation particular interesting:

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.

“You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it.

“Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

The simplicity and ubiquity of some of these services is beginning to see activity feeds and status updates replace many of the uses to which e-mail was once put.

Everybody working in an enterprise setting know email is a tool that increasing is failing, some of the key problems are

• irrelevant mass mails (no way to choice what to be informed about/follow)
• few engage with communication by email
• it doesn’t work as a tool for knowledge sharing
• it isn’t the right tool for collaboration

Use of social networks has the potential to change this and most companies want to improve these areas but hasn’t included facilitation of social networking and use of web 2.0 tools in their strategy.

Social networks have already had a huge impact on how people interact outside the work place, no doubt it will find way to the workplace too – graduates will soon expect web 2.0 tools and social networking in the same way as they expect email, phones and instant message today, technology does not move from enterprise to the personal use any longer, but the other way round now.

I think Karl Rouhe is spot on, the challenge for for enterprises and their HR and communication team is to enable masses of  communicators rather than communicating to the masses.

It I will be interesting to see how social network and web 2.0 tools will change how people engage, collaborate, and share knowledge,