Don't Learn Social Media on the Fly

Social media, when properly managed, can be a direct line to customers, opening a dialogue where customers' wants, needs, praise and complaints can be heard and responded to. Then why do so few companies provide their staff with the training to successfully participate on social networks?

Employees can Handle the Truth, Management Can’t

A recent research study showed that only half of employees feel as if they receive the proper training to successfully participate in social networks. Contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in "A Few Good Men," employees can handle the truth and senior management should as well. After all, how can you address your customers’ needs if you don't give them a chance to speak, even if it's online?

After working with some of the largest companies in the country, it’s clear that most employees desperately want to learn how to properly conduct themselves online as well as how to reach out to unhappy customers. They want to blog well, tweet responsibly and not break any Facebook laws so they can turn their “detractors” into Net Promoters, where they will change from stating negative comments about the company to recommending it to their peers and friends.

This should not be surprising considering 40 percent of companies hesitate to let their staff engage with customers online for fear that someone might say something negative about their organization.

Most Companies want Employees to Learn Social Media on the Fly

This highlights the need to provide the proper guidelines, guardrails and guidance to help workers engage more effectively on Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks. The problem, however, is that employees usually have to learn social media on the fly and learn how to properly engage with customers through trial and error.

This is not the way to run a business. Social Media Training can help you and your coworkers engage in more constructive conversations online.

Why Is Training Important?

The Broken Window Theory: I was first introduced to this theory in 1990 when William Bratton cleaned up the streets of New York City by significantly reducing crime rates. He believed that without law enforcement, people would damage things, and if they knew they could commit these crimes without any repercussions, they would continue to break the law (and not just windows).

The same is true for un-moderated communities and social networks. So, it's important to have well-trained moderators working in your online communities and reading your blog comments. After all, it’s human nature to test authority figures.

You’ve Got the Whole World in your Hands: While everyone knows that mobile devices are increasing in popularity, people often forget that these are, what Peter Mass, ProPublica reporter calls, "potentially a gold mine of data-mining information for companies.”

The Internet Never Forgets: All you have to do is go to Waybackmachine.org and look up your company’s home page from the 1990s. If you work at Fortune 1000 company, it’s probably there; or you can start looking at your Facebook Timeline and see some pictures of yourself.

Those are just three reasons why it’s imperative for companies to develop well-thought out social media policies and training programs.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Google Takes Privacy Red Team Public

Google has not had much luck lately winning privacy advocates as fans. The company has been a frequent target of privacy complaints and just settled its very expensive Safari privacy case with the FTC. Now Google is taking another step to improve its privacy image — growing its Privacy Red Team.

Google’s New Public Focus on Privacy

A new job posting from Google shows the company is expanding its Privacy Red Team. Google is not the first company to create a red team. Red teams, a small group of highly skilled experts, have existed in the security space for decades. These teams usually attempt to find security flaws in networks, hardware or software, but Google is repurposing the concept for privacy.

Based on the job description, Google’s Privacy Red Team identifies, researches and resolves user privacy risks in the company’s products, services and business processes. The advertised Data Privacy Engineer position requires,

an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of modern web browsers and computer networks, enjoy analyzing software designs and implementations from both a privacy and security perspective, and will be recognized experts at discovering and prioritizing subtle, unusual, and emergent security flaws”

It is unclear if the Privacy Red Team is an existing team being expanded or a new group formed to address Google’s continuing issues with privacy. Whatever the case, the search giant is clearly investing in user privacy.

The investment is definitely a good move. The public perception of the company’s attitude toward user privacy has taken a beaten the last few years. Google replaced the privacy policies for its products and services with a single, comprehensive policy as part of a simplification effort in January. The action was an epic failure from a public relations perspective; privacy advocate immediately attacked the new policy because users could not opt out.

Google also recently settled its privacy case with the FTC stemming from its use of cookies in Safari browsers. A Stanford researcher discovered Google was monitoring users that had selected the “do not track” setting, despite language on its help pages that suggested otherwise. The company admitted no wrong, but agreed to pay one of the largest fines in history for a case of this type — US$ 22.5 million.

What’s Next

Google has a long and bumpy road to travel to find the correct balance between its interests and privacy concerns. The company generates most of its revenue by selling data and ads about its users to its true customers — advertisers. Marketers always want to know more. Privacy advocates always want to share less. It’s unlikely that both sides will ever be completely satisfied. 

Google must satisfy its customers, but cannot become so invasive collecting data that it alienates its mainstream users. Its massive size also makes it an easy target for attention. Google will need to move cautiously with efforts like its Privacy Red Team to find the most effective balance.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Path from Fileshare to SharePoint

One of the major complaints about SharePoint is that, while it contains the potential for expanded business productivity and automation, within many organizations it has become yet another file share. 

While that may be true, the primary difference is that, unlike those old file shares, SharePoint has the potential to be expanded upon. It is the sleeping giant in the organization. And funny enough, one of the major trends these days is movement of old network file shares and their vast volumes of unstructured data into SharePoint.

Let's examine why this shift is happening. For one, the adoption lifecycle for SharePoint as a platform is maturing, with over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies either owning 2010 or planning to move to 2010. SharePoint adds many benefits that file shares just can’t provide, including retention policies, taxonomy and metadata, business productivity through workflow and forms, and robust document editing and versioning capability, to name a few.

The number one reason organizations delay their file share migration to SharePoint is fear of the unknown — they simply don't know where to start.

Understanding the Options

According to my colleague Mark McGovern, the logical place to begin the planning process of moving network file shares to SharePoint is to do an inventory, and determine which types of file shares are appropriate to migrate and which are not:

Some questions to ask during this process are: What is the volume of content to be moved? How often is it accessed? Does it need to be retained for a set period due to compliance reasons? Are the documents highly collaborative? Lots of small documents that are modified frequently and need to be retained for a given period would be a great candidate for migration. It is usually a combination of factors that determines the decision."

The next place that many organizations get "stuck" is in deciding the method for the migration. Depending on the skillset on hand, the timeframe in which to move the content or the complexity of content (multiple versions, historical metadata or maybe just the sheer volume of content), administrators can attempt to do it manually, they can engage their developers to write some custom code or use PowerShell scripts, or they can purchase one of many 3rd party tools on the market that support the SharePoint environment.

As Mark points out, the answer to that question — as with all difficult decisions in the SharePoint world — is that "It depends."

Mark adds,

There are pros and cons of each method. For example, when uploading files manually, the CreatedBy, CreatedDate, ModifedBy and ModifiedDate are not maintained. For legal reasons, this loss of historical metadata may rule out this method. Fortunately, there are tools on the market that can retain this important metadata."

Migration Considerations

Most file shares have become a dumping ground for content. While there may be valuable content within your system, it is likely you also have massive amounts of duplicate, outdated and unnecessary content that should be purged from your system. As you prepare to move this content, some questions you should ask include:

• Do you know what content is out there?
• Do you know who owns the content, and whether it even needs to be moved? (maybe it can remain, but indexed and therefore searchable)
• Is the folder structure important?
• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?
• Is the plan to move the content as-is and decommission your hardware, or will you attempt to organize/clean up the content prior to your migration?
• Will some content remain on the old system? (it might be tied to other internal tools that are not yet ready to move to SharePoint, or may never move to SharePoint)
• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy? (using the existing folder structure, or creating a new taxonomy)
• Are users driving the clean up and tagging process, or is it an administrative effort?

Whatever method you decide to employ, the single most important aspect of migrating file share content to SharePoint is the metadata applied. As much as possible, make sure that you tag your documents with metadata during the migration, as applying metadata later can be labor-intensive, and you may introduce a greater potential for human error (you miss some of the content, don't apply new metadata or content types everywhere). Adding metadata tags during the migration makes your content more “findable” and easier to surface through search or through SharePoint's social capabilities.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com