Social media risks of a poor or non-existent social media policy.

Good morning Bloggers!

Today I am Blogging about the Social media risks which can happen as a result of having a poor or no social media policy at all.

A quick recap on what a social media policy is, courtesy of Dundas Lawyers

"A Social Media Policy (SMP) is a document that supplements a contract of employment to be legally enforceable by an organisation on its employees. The aim of an SMP is to clearly communicate what is acceptable conduct on Social Networking Sites by an organisations employees and contractors and what conduct is unacceptable and would make an employee liable to dismissal.
An SMP is distinct from an organisations Social Media Strategy (SMS) which is a high level document that communicates how an organisation plans to participate in social media."

Various different organisations and company structures are open to different types of social media risks, some house highly confidential personal information which could be leaked internally to the external environment, others could be open to defamation in the case of on-line retailers or sectors where intangible assets are the most valuable - so clearly a highly resilient and bulletproof SMP is essential to ensure that social media is correctly handled in the organisation to ensure a positive outcome.

For our analysis i have chosen Westpac Banking Corporation, more common just know by the big red "W" or "Westpac". This group is a banking organisation founded 1982, it currently participates in social media by having a Facebook, Twitter and a Linkedin page.

As a banking corporation employees would house highly confidential information on customers, such as tax file numbers, account numbers, financial details and personally identifiable information, which having a loose unenforced SMP could result in information being divulged internally to externally, like the company tweeting "we don't like this person, here is his account number, pin and tax file number" extreme example, but similar things have happened. Here are some analysed risks for Westpac which i have identified that they could be open to for participating in social media

• Defamation
• People could go to the page and make abrasive comments tarnishing the brand, weather the comment is true or false
• Poor policies in place to deal with complaints handled via social media could tarnish the brand, it would show they are not active in the social world
• Loss of Confidential Information
• A rouge employee or intern could accidentally or purposely release company information
• Including but not limited to: Customer information, business strategies, employee information, details on the recent lay-off of 50 people which was meant to be kept company-secret
• Rouge employees could release information which competitors could use for their own gain
• Reputation Risk
• Any one of these breaches which occurs in social media and is visible to the public could have a devastating effect on the companies intangible assets, take the Dominoes Pizza "Dirty Incident" for example, in this case the wake was huge, as was it a massive dent to the companies image for quality and trust
• If the social media application is not properly moderated by an accompanying social media policy, anyone who has the password to the application in the organisation would have control of it, so there is no way of getting back control of the application if the employee resigns or is terminated, so "smear" campaigns are possible, the employee could go on a personal vendetta tarnishing the image with abrasive comments or revealing information on company executives, customers or employees

These are risks i have identified in Westpac participation in Social Media, with many thanks to Dundas Lawyers page on various types of social media risks

With the proper social media policy in place for westpac it would ensure comments and queires are handled in a timely manner when made on a social application (e.g. customer asking for support information on the official facebook page) and ensure that any defamatory comments are quickly removed or moderated from the page to ensure the companies intangibles are not tarnished in any way. A social media policy could also help for internal sitautions where the SMP is integrated in the terms of employeement the employee signs, so if the employee breaches the SMP he or she is liable for dissmissal or worse, legal proceedings against them. an SMP would also have a net effect of reducing all risks of reputation damage to the company logo by ensuring nothing slanderous, defamatory or illegal is posted on the social media application.

Social media policies are crucial to ensure social media is handled properly in an organisation, without a social media policy there is really no legal pavement in place for legal action to be taken on an internal individual e.g. dismissal or employee, policies in place to hand over rights to the social media application, etc.

Thanks for reading, please comment if you liked reading my Blog.

Value levers associated with E2 at PC Case Gear

Good morning Bloggers!

Today I'm going to discuss various value levers which can be associated to companies embracing Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 technologies in there on-line digital presence.

In todays example I will be talking about the on-line PC hardware and software mega retailer PC Case gear, known as "PCCG" for short. Since PCCG operates as an online entity there online presence could immediately benefit many levers of value such as

• Marketing & Sales
• By getting feedback from customers on a facebook page or twitter feed they could better cater there services to what the customer wants, providing a wider gamut of useful products the customer will likely buy
• Improve sales by offering promotions on a social media site such as twitter or a facebook wall page
• Customer Support
• Customers could quickly get support from the company through a facebook wall
• Could get information from the company without having to call up or email
• Operations & Distribution
• Could get statistics from facebook about who, where, why and when customers visit there page, to better determine where there physical presence in australia would benefit (e.g. store locations, distribution centers, etc)

Currently PCCG has an online digital presence in a enterprise 2.0 technology which is a facebook page community. As shown they have already demonstrated they have an enterprise 2.0 approach by showing the customer service value lever:

As you can see a customer has come to the page, stated that his product which he purchased form the company was faulty and sought information on how he could go about rectifying the situation, the company replied in a short time advising the customer how they could go about gaining support from the company which was via email.

In another example PCCG is using social technologies to use the Marketing and Sales value lever (Specifically elements 5, 6 & 7 from this table in section "Marketing & Sales") by running a competition to "guess" the amount of Smarties in the jar to win various products

So we see that companies having an on-line Enterprise 2.0 presence can provide a very powerful way for the company and customers to either gain support, view the latest products and win goodies in promotions.

Thankyou for reading my Blog post, be sure to comment and subscribe!

Web 2.0, What, Why and How?

Introduction:

Hello readers, welcome to my second blog post, in this article i want to go into discussion about what is web 2.0, how can you use it and what benefits can arise from doing so. But before i go into deep detail, firstly i would like to answer a question which may or may not be in your minds...

"..Just what is Web 2.0?"

Web 2.0 is a term coined to describe the massive boom in online social technologies which has arisen in the passed decade, there is no solid definition, but the most widely accepted description is:

a second generation in the development of the World Wide Web, conceived as a combination of concepts,trends, and technologies that focus on user collaboration, sharing of user-generated content, and social networking.

So when you look at various examples of things you use on a daily basis, Facebook, Twitter or any other socially enabled application, you are using something based upon Web 2.0.

In my day to day duties i use several Web 2.0 applications to assist me in production, keeping up to date with the latest trends in politics and watching what my friends have done in the week on Facebook. I find Facebook a great experience and i only recently got into it when i started my University degree - it just makes keeping up to date with group work and assignments so much easier. I also use LinkedIn to keep me up to date on what my coworkers are doing and to keep "online" for career purposes. Another great service i use is called "Mapmyrun", it is a GPS smartphone application which tracks you when you go for a jog or light walk and then shows your status' and routes for which you can share with others, there are even options to have "track records" for certain routes you create.

So here are some examples of what i do on Web 2.0 applications, but there are plenty more out there that people use.

All examples of (but not limited to) various web 2.0 enabled socially enabled sites.

How can Web 2.0 applications benefit the average Joe:

There are many ways in which you can benefit from social media these may not always be fully realized, you may not think so but when you think about it there are so many things you do with your web 2.0 application that if it didn't exist... how would you do this task differently?

Share a photo with a family friend?

Keep in touch with people you went to school with?

Share information in an open Wikipedia of information?

Food for thought.

Types of Web 2.0 Enabled social sites/services:

• Social Networks - Services that allow you to connect with other people of similar interests and background.  Usually they consist of a profile, various ways to interact with other users, ability to setup groups, etc. The most popular are Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Bookmarking Sites - Services that allow you to save, organize and manage links to various websites and resources around the internet.  Most allow you to “tag” your links to make them easy to search and share.  The most popular are Delicious and StumbleUpon.
• Social News - Services that allow people to post various news items or links to outside articles and then allows it’s users to”vote” on the items.  The voting is the core social aspect as the items that get the most votes are displayed the most prominently.  The community decides which news items get seen by more people.  The most popular are Digg and Reddit.
• Media Sharing - Services that allow you to upload and share various media such as pictures and video.  Most services have additional social features such as profiles, commenting, etc.  The most popular are YouTube and Flickr.
• Micro-blogging - Services that focus on short updates that are pushed out to anyone subscribed to receive the updates.  The most popular is Twitter.
• Blog Comments and Forums - Online forums allow members to hold conversations by posting messages.  Blog comments are similar except they are attached to blogs and usually the discussion centers around the topic of the blog post.  There are MANY popular blogs and forums.

Thank you for reading.

The journey to becoming a successful blogger

Hello!

Thanks for visiting my blogging space. Today I want to go over some tips and strategies for successful blogging and reaching as many people as possible. I will be applying many of these strategies in the future when I go to prepare a blog post. My goal for blogging is to disseminate, listen to the community, learn from community response and use this information to better augment my future blogging endeavors (speak-listen-learn)

What are some strategies and elements that make up a successful blog?

1. Punctuation, spelling and Grammar

This one is pretty basic, ensure you use proper word in the proper way spelled correctly. No one is going to read a blog which is littered with inconsistent English

2.       Graphics and other “eye catching” elements
Images will always grab the reader’s attention; generally make sure the images are somewhat relevant to the subject of the blog.

3.       Bullet points

·         They attract the reader’s attention. You were likely drawn straight to these bullet points when you first opened this article.

·         They make referencing key points much easier

·         Data looks more simple and easier for the reader to understand

·         Can make the overall layout cleaner and more professional

4.       “Be there”
When someone responds to your blog via a comment, be sure to reply to it, this is actively engaging in the community which can raise your blogs audience numbers – not only this, but it shows the audience that you care about community input.

5.       Be original and have interesting content
You want your blog to stand out from the others? You need to be creative, offer a read that no other blog offers, have a very controversial topic or a discussion on a current event.

6.       Have a great headline title

You want the first thing a reader to see is your title, so make it in a way that ensures it grabs there attention straight up.

7.       Get your blog out there
If no one knows your blog exists, no one will check it out – makes sense, right? Disseminating your blog is the process of “spreading word” of your blog; this could be either through Facebook, MySpace, twitter, email or even in person. The more people who know about your blog the more people will visit.


With these strategies in hand I hope to create a highly inspiring blog space for readers and to actively participate in the community. Some blogs I find interesting to read are Ditto Music Blog. Obviously judging from the title it is a blogging space for the latest news on everything related to music, I find it a good blog as it is regularly posted to and comments are generally replied to from the blogger in a short amount of time - these two things i find very important in a blog, a blog isn't just a random area for you to vent, it's a way to reach a vast community of others where you can share ideas, make friends or just sit down and write a journal of whatever happened in your day to day life... OK so it may also be a place to vent.