Louis Halpern's View

What an employee posts online, even in a personal guise, can have direct implications for their employer. This is a problem that we’ve seen before, from naked policeman in public sector organisations like The Met to offensive retail staff in Currys and PC World, and it’s a problem we can expect to see time and time again unless businesses start taking a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy.

Following the sacking of naked bobby Malcolm Thomas, a senior Met source said on the incidence that: “Firearms officers must behave impeccably in their professional and personal life. They cannot lay themselves open to blackmail or disclose information that could put them or their colleagues at risk. Armed officers keep surveillance on terrorists and serious criminal suspects. It is not appropriate that their most personal details should be open for anyone to view.”

Employers need to be proactive in ensuring that their workforce understands the impact of their online activity not just for them, but for the wider business. To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct. whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Train key members of staff as social media Tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff
• Set up official social media accounts across the major platforms

I keep hearing an old refrain that I was reminded of in an article in today’s Financial Times – “Twittering Workers Cost Businesses £1.4bn.” Oh yeah. All that time spent on social media at work. Shockingly, the article found the average person spends 40 minutes a week on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook (my casual observation is that this is an understatement) and valued the time wasted by employees at £1.4bn per annum.

I believe this research has the wrong spin. We should be talking about the potential for UK businesses to use their talent pool to spread positive messaging about their brands.

Just think… what do people do when they spend time on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc? They communicate, recommend, discuss and share thoughts. After all, everyone works for a brand, however big or small the organization. Customers will only continue to buy if they feel good about the service they’re receiving. So, it’s vital to tell everyone how good the company you work for is.

Your staff are going to take up time on social media whether you like it or not. The first step towards getting a return on your investment of time and money is to empower your staff to use social media to help your business.

Here are my tips to spreading the word on your organization:

* Find out who wants to be involved and own the project.

* Identify some true, positive things to say about your workplace.

* Discuss it – social media is about engagement, so talk about it!

* Set up official social media accounts across the major platforms.

Now, here are some starter points to make social messaging work for your company:

* Post true and positive messages about your company.

The logic of this strategy is twofold: If it’s positive, customers will like it. And if it’s not true… well, don’t lie.

* Encourage your staff to update their status in a work-related way.

Broadcast it, Retweet it, Digg it, the more honest positive reviews you have online, the better. Social media is about noise and engagement. If it’s not out there, no one will find out about, respond to, or be engaged with your product.

* Follow/Friend all your colleagues as a matter of course.

Friending your colleagues first encourages them to build an online social network that reflects the company’s real life one. In addition, it creates a powerful motivator for employees to advertise their company, connect and share ideas with one another.

* Encourage messaging about your achievements.

Social media is a great platform to increase awareness. Why not publicise positive performances in the workplace? If you do your part to encourage your employees, they are also more motivated to respond in kind. Who knows, all that extra visibility might even get some of your best people a pay rise.

* Drive traffic to your company’s website by encouraging the broadcasting of relevant links in posts.

Simultaneously enhance both your company’s visibility AND its reputation. Also, your website becomes associated with quality links and quality content – a great reflection on your brand.

* Communicate collaboratively with colleagues, suppliers and customers.

This strategy can help your business to increase productivity and provides an additional platform upon which you can build strategically to grow your business.

* Connect with thought leaders to get pushed industry information.

You don’t have to read the book, buy the magazine or attend the conference to connect to best minds in your industry. Using social media, get these ideas instantaneously and monitor the industry response.

* Contribute to idea formation in your industry by posting your thoughts and innovations.

Social media can help make you a leader in your own right. If your colleagues understand they can have an accessible, instantaneous and cutting edge stream of business-relevant information, they’ll return, link, comment and subscribe. Everyone wins.

I was going to tweet but they postponed planned maintenance to aid the Iranian protestors [http://is.gd/13MDT]

I’m not sure if I know enough about Mousavi’s positions about lots of issues that are important to me.

I am sure that I do not like oppression.

I am sure that I like the way that the Internet and what we call social media is a democratizing force that allows humans to exchange messages and interact one to many in a way that has never been possible before.

If we don’t act to use these forces as a catalyst for change we could lose a unique opportunity to create a global community where the values of helping one another, which are common amongst people can slip away from us.

As an Internet / Social Media professional I’m sitting here thinking about holding an impromptu event in my office on Friday morning to see how fellow UK professionals in this area can get together and help our friends in Iran looking for a bit more freedom. We can stream it over the internet etc..

I’m going post a tweet this blog entry when twitter goes back up. If I get DM’s comments etc before midday on Thursday 17th June the HC team will organize it.

15% of final job applicants don’t actually get an offer due to their online postings, according to LinkedIn’s General Council, Erika Rottenberg.

 She revealed this information at a lunch time talk at Santa Clara University on the 29^th January 2009.  At the same time she gave some great examples of good and bad personal reputation [brand] management.

 The good. Henk van Ess, the “Accidental Entrepreneur,” who is now a successful web retailer after discovering a better iPhone battery from China.  He used LinkedIn for his marketing.

 The bad. Joshua Lipton (AP story). Josh was waiting sentencing in a drunk driving incident in which he caused serious harm to his victim. Whilst waiting he went to a Halloween party in a “jailbird” costume wearing jailhouse attire, and photos from the party were posted to his Facebook page. The prosecutor submitted the photos to the judge and he went to jail for longer.

 As you all know I’ve been writing a book on his subject and thanks Erika for these facts and Rich West for spotting them for me.

 << And in case you have Google Alerts on your name Erika or somebody forwards this link to you …  Please have a look at our new Halpern Personal reputation management service. To validate that were GC at LinkedIn I found that it was really difficult to find on you Google which I think it a bit more used than LinkedIn.  As a subject expert we’ll give you a discount ;¬) >>

London 9:38 29^th Jan 2009 Transcript

- talking about the Semantic Internet.

Louis: It was originally a concept thought of by Tim Berners-Lee. Do you know who Tim Berners-Lee is?

Tommy: No.

Louis: Tim Berners-Lee was the founding father of the internet. He is also the head of W3C. He kind of is credited with inventing it [the internet].

Tommy: Okay.

Louis: In 1999 he said, “I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analyzing all the data on the web, the content, the links and the transactions between people and computers. A Semantic Web, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge. But when it does, the day to day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

People have done have started to roll out the 1^st generation applications that will make up the Semantic Internet — have you seen it on iTunes, have you downloaded Genius?

Tommy: I love that on my iTunes

Louis: What Genius does is it uses a database to cross-reference your musical taste for the track you are listening to and creates a playlist. It matches your data with other data from everyone else and bingo, it suggests a track you might like listening to. Well that is just the Semantic Internet in one dimension.

The better example of a Semantic Internet would be: say, you know someone in a hospital and what you do is you look up their condition – kidney infection. And you go, oh my God that is really awful. You found out they were in the hospital because you got an email that you have looked at, in your Google inbox or your online inbox. The contextual information around it says “homeopathic cure for kidney infection”. You want to find out if it’s worked for other people. You get directed to a couple of glowing reviews. That is pretty good you think. I would like to buy that ‘cure’ for this person. You click on it, bang! My browser directs me straight to the store to buy it and the Semantic Internet is that clever because it has associated hospital with that day delivery service. Information pops up and says, “Would you like to use the delivery service?”

That is the example of how the Semantic Internet may change commerce and trade and the way we work. I think that’s the way Tim Berners-Lee originally envisaged it. The computers are connected together and by pulling all that information together logically. It is not filtering or a popularity test in the way that Google and other search engines do now.

Instead it is join up the data, it is helping to suggest the next thing we might think of. And that is kind of the vision I have for the internet. When the other concepts we talk about a lot like the Ubiquitous internet become a reality society will change, productivity will accelerate and humans should make another great leap forward.

Or maybe the machines will out think us – but that’s for another day

[Tommy works with me at HC]