SMUG Social Media University Global

Facebook Business Tip: Make Geographic Network Primary

Some employers have policies against their employees indicating their work affiliation in public communications of a potentially controversial nature, such as in letters to the editor or emails to public officials. They don’t want the employees’ individual positions on a particular issue to be misconstrued as the company position.

The everyone-is-a-world-wide-publisher era of the web presents additional challenges to these policies, particularly in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. But with thoughtful personal practices and policy development, employees and employers can find ways to preserve employees’ rights to expression without dragging the company name into controversies.

In Facebook, for example, you can avoid this issue by making your geographic network primary, and your employer network secondary.

I first saw this potential problem when I visited Wal-Mart’s Roomate Style Match group in Facebook and saw the “lively” discussion on its wall, with many people voicing strong anti-Wal-Mart opinions and others coming to the company’s defense.

The substance of that argument isn’t the point of this post. The point is that the primary network for each discussion (or argument) participant is listed next to his or her name. That’s fine for people in college, where wide-open discussions are fair game (or at least were before the advent of campus speech codes.)

It’s different in the work world. Employees are free to participate in these kinds of discussions as private individuals, but employers understandably wouldn’t want their names drawn into the fight.

So here’s the solution: If you haven’t joined a geographic network in Facebook, do it now. Then go to your Account settings in Facebook, choose the Networks tab, and click the “Make Primary” button next to your geographic network. Like this:

Your Networks profile will look like this:

Then, when you participate in a discussion, instead of having your employer’s name next to yours, your geographic location would be listed.

So, here are the implications and applications for you:

As an employee, just do it. Change your primary network to your geographic or regional network. It’s probably better for you anyway because it will make your primary network broader.
As an employer, you should consider making this part of your public internet communication policy for employees. If they participate in Facebook, MySpace or other social networks, they should take care that the company’s name is not directly attached to discussions of a political or controversial nature. The method I have described above accomplishes this for people using Facebook.

This essentially preserves what companies have been trying to accomplish through policies about use of the company name in letters to the editor or letters to government officials. These longstanding policies can’t prevent people from finding out that a writer of a controversial newspaper article works for your company, but they have to dig a little to find out.

Likewise, by making the company affiliation secondary in Facebook, your company’s name isn’t directly attached to the communication. People can discover where the writer works, and the “digging” online is a little easier, but the company name isn’t right there next to your opinion.

In a future post I will discuss why employers blocking Facebook access at work, or barring employees from attaching their work email address to their account, is counterproductive. Yes, counterproductive, even though some shortsighted companies list productivity concerns among the reasons to block Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, Business, Networks, productivity, MySpace, employers, work, employees, Wal-Mart, policies, email

Jott Blog Post

One of the really interesting futures in web 2.0 is hole applications can be develop they can work together. In this case I am working with Jott’s to devolop a blog post for my wordpress blog. I have also expermented with Twitter. So I am going to see how this works out with the a blog post.
Click here to listen

Later: I did this from my cell phone on the way to lunch. I think it’s kind of neat that you can click through the link and hear exactly what I said, because the transcription isn’t perfect. I’ll have some more thoughts on this and on Twitter with Jott later.

Technorati: Twitter, WordPress, Jott

Facebook and Twitter: Off-Label Uses

Too many people look at the latest social media gadgets and can’t get beyond first impressions and what’s on the packaging.
They see the “What are you doing?” interface at the top of Twitter and they say, “How pointless and narcissistic is that?” “Who cares what I’m doing right now?” And “Why would I care what you’re doing?”

Or they see the “poke” lingo in Facebook and can’t imagine serious business uses.

They miss the point. It’s not about the initial application as envisioned by the developer; it’s about what you can envision as an implication of the application.

To paraphrase Ted Kennedy eulogizing his brother Bobby: “Some men see Twitter as it is and say ‘Why?’ I dream new uses for social media and say, ‘Why not?'”

These aren’t like pharmaceuticals that should be used only as directed. Off-label use is fine.

For example, Twitter could be one way to rapidly alert an emergency response team that they have been activated. You could create a Twitter account called “Your company alerts” and have all of your key staff subscribe to cell phone alerts from that account. You wouldn’t use the account except in an emergency.

But then, when a disaster strikes, you would have Twitter as one way of getting the word out. As Dennis McDonald recommends, you wouldn’t rely on it as your only means of communication, but it could potentially shave several precious minutes off the time it takes to reach everyone. You could use Twitter to send a message like this to get your team to participate in a crisis activation call:

Explosion at plant. Conference call at 800-555-1212 at 8:45 for details of emergency activation.

At the same time, you could start working through your old-fashioned phone tree until you know that the message was successfully delivered.

Likewise, you could create a secret Facebook group called “Your Company Crisis Management” and have all of your key staff join. Then, when a disaster hits, you could use the Message All Members function to blast an alert to everyone (which may include sending text messages to some), and you could use the Wall and Discussion Board to post information your team needs and to clarify issues.

This kind of group could remain invisible to the general public; you could create a companion site (or a blog) very quickly for public interactions.
I’m quite certain that neither Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter founder Biz Stone envisioned this kind of use for their applications when they began developing them.

What kind of “off-label” uses for social media have you found?

Technorati: Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, Crisis Communications, Crisis management, crisis, disaster, Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone

Google Will Spur Facebook Growth

Facebook‘s so-called “walled garden” is about to get a lot more like the blood-brain barrier, which is good news for people who want Facebook to become their all-in-one networking utility.

And the privacy concerns some are immediately raising seem to be reflexive rather than reflective.

In biology, the blood-brain barrier protects the brain from chemicals in the bloodstream. Likewise, Facebook puts up a barrier to the wider internet that prevents spam messages from getting through.

Facebook announced today that extremely limited versions of its users’ profiles will be available for viewing through Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Techcrunch rightly notes the grave implications for some start-ups looking to fill the people search niche. An SEO blog also notes benefits for companies that want to be found online (and therefore for their customers, who are looking for them). Other reasonable analyses are here, here and here.
Many of the objections raised today are the standard response of those who see a privacy threat in every aggregation of online data, or worse yet, a conspiracy. Like this laughable Flash-in-the-pan that tries to connect Facebook’s Terms of Service (in which users are saying, in legalese, that they have the right to upload whatever they put on Facebook and that Facebook has the right to display it on the internet) to everything from global climate change to the JFK assassination.

In essence, the Google bots will come in a month from now (after everyone in Facebook has had the opportunity to opt out) and will index profile content. But when your (or my) Facebook profile comes back in the search results, all anyone will see will be something like this:

Hard to see a big threat there. And those with phobias about privacy implications can opt out, so no one outside Facebook can search for them.

For the fearless, this is a great development. I will be able to do a Google search for people I know and find out whether they are in Facebook, so I can send them a message or a friend request. But because people who aren’t Facebook members can’t send a message without joining, we don’t have to worry about this opening the spam floodgates.

It will, however, encourage lots more people to join Facebook, as they see Facebook listings for people they know showing up high in the Google results, and as they discover they need to be members to send a message to them.

Facebook has been growing at over a million users a week already; this will only accelerate what Newsweek called its “astonishing” growth.

Technorati: Facebook, Google, Techcrunch, privacy

12 Tips for Social Media Success

Jeremiah Owyang highlights a well-done white paper by Chris Kenton from MotiveLab called “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media” by calling attention to the first tip: Establish Clear Business Objectives and Metrics. There’s a good reason why that’s first: too often a project will be launched without a clear sense of where it fits in the organization’s overall strategy.

Like Jeremiah, I highly recommend this paper, which you can download here by joining the Facebook group Chris established, called MotiveLab Network.

But while Jeremiah called attention to the first point, I would like to highlight the last:

Fail Quickly. Fail Cheaply.

If you’re launching your first social media program, focus on an initiative with minimal investment in time and money. Success is more often than not an iterative process. You’re likely to fail. So do it quickly, do it cheaply, and correct your course. Don’t set out with a big initiative that ties up a lot of resources putting all the bells and whistles into a flashy launch, unless you’re ready for a flashy failure. Social media lends itself well to this kind of iterative and incremental process.

This ties to some of my previous posts about why building a community site within an existing social network like Facebook makes sense, at least as a way to start.

First, I think it will give you maximum likelihood of success, because a certain portion of your target audience already is in Facebook. You’re not asking them to sign up for a new username/password. And if they’re not in Facebook yet, asking them to sign up isn’t asking for more commitment than if you were just inviting them to your own homebrewed or “white label” site. So for getting people to join your online community, the simplicity factor either favors Facebook (for existing users) or is a wash.

For you as the developer of the community, however, forming a Facebook group is much simpler than either of the other options. You can create a Facebook group in less than an hour, even as a complete novice — and even if you spend the first 45 minutes exploring the Facebook group settings.
That leads me back to Chris’ point about failing faster. I believe using Facebook for your first foray into social media makes failure less likely, but even if you find that it doesn’t work as well as you had hoped, it will cost you less for this social media education, both in time and money, than if you set up a standalone site.

If you find your Facebook group experiment is a miserable failure, as Administrator you can end it. I just set up a group to test this, and invited my youngest daughter to join. Here’s what that page looked like:

Right after she joined it, I used the “Edit Members” function to remove her as a member, and then I changed the status of the group to “Secret.” It’s as if the group had never existed; like Stalin without the political assassinations.
So, if you formed a group in Facebook and it absolutely didn’t work, you could put it out of your misery (although it probably would be best in a case like that to have introduced it as a pilot; for Wal-Mart’s Facebook group an attempt to disband would bring bad PR.)

A more likely scenario might be, as Chris suggests, that you experiment with a social media platform like Facebook so both you and your intended community learn whether this kind of networking would be mutually valuable. You may see some features missing that would be helpful or even crucial to its success, and then you can focus development efforts on either extending the Facebook functionality through the F8 platform, or using what you learned in developing an alternative.

Whatever you decide, you can either then enhance your Facebook site, or use the Message All Members function to let everyone know that the action has moved over to a new site. This is much better than taking months to develop a site, perhaps pouring development resources into functions your users may not value, and lagging behind your competitors in engaging customers in conversations.
Even if you eventually go to another “new and improved” site, you would still have your outpost in Facebook, so that as people are there and perhaps looking for your organization, you can have this group with a link to your “real” networking site.

Here’s a demonstration of what that might look like:

As Dennis McDonald says in another interesting white paper, you should incorporate social media into your crisis communication plan because these tools will be used by others in a crisis. Likewise, since some people will search for your organization’s name in Facebook (especially as it continues to add users at an “astonishing” rate), you should at minimum have a presence there so people can find your “official” site via a link on that page.

Sometimes faster failure is the key to success.

Technorati: Facebook, 12 tips, Social Media, Dennis McDonald, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Kenton, MotiveLab, Wal-Mart, Networking, Social Networking, Facebook Groups, Groups, failure, faster failure, tips, success