“It’s the dumbest policy in the world to block your employees from going to social media sites,” said Mark Ragan, a Chicago-based corporate communications specialist. “You get Gen Y entering the workforce, and those people live on Facebook. … They’ll laugh at you.”

Does this bring back memories from the 90’s when the Internet started penetrating businesses? How long did companies resist? What about email? How long was your organization able to resist that movement? Then came instant messaging, then text messages and now social media. History is repeating itself all over again and the companies that get social first will separate themselves from the pack, both in the eyes of consumers and in the resulting profits.

As I pointed out in my previous blog post, “10 reasons you should use social networks for business,” an Accenture survey of Millennial preferences found that recent grads prefer to communicate via instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook and RSS feeds. One Millennial MBA said, “I need to access my Facebook in order to do my job.” Shut down access to social networks, and you may shut down access to top employees.

“I think there’s a greater risk not to” give employees access, said Mary Henige, director of social media and digital communications for General Motors. “If you want to be an employer of choice, especially with younger people, they’re going to completely expect to do this.”

The connection coefficient remains in full effect. The more connected employees are (to other employees, partners, customers, prospects, etc) the more value the employees and therefore the enterprise will experience. This applies in all areas of business – recruiting, marketing, and even sales. In fact, a July 2009 study by the Altimeter group found that brands deeply engaged in social had an “18% increase in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period.”

“One of the things they’ve talked about is how e-mail was looked at 10 years ago — as risky — and now it’s accepted so much as a business tool,” said Kristen Cislo, branch manager for information technology staffing company Robert Half Technology. “Are we going through the same thing with social networking?”

In short, lines are blurring between business and personal use of social networks so companies that want to keep increasing sales, attract the top talent and meet customer expectations shouldn’t shut down these activities. Instead create your policies, be upfront with your workforce and customers, and automate your policies so everyone wins.

The bottom line? You don’t. Here’s why.

The lines between personal and business are inextricably linked. Who knows if that high school buddy you reconnected with on Facebook might be looking for a financial advisor? Sure, you wouldn’t lead every message to every long-lost friend with, “So, do you have life insurance?” but we constantly turn to friends in our “real” lives for referrals, and the same thing happens in social networking.

Facebook and LinkedIn don’t allow you to have two accounts, as part of their terms of service. Sorry, you can’t be “Genius FA” AND “Average Joe” on these sites. You don’t want your friends – or clients – having to “choose” which persona to follow, and, in any case, who has time to update two totally different accounts?

You would artificially limit your reach if you separate your two networks. If your “business” account only focused on business, you could miss out on potential opportunities to help your neighbors and old football buddies. Worse, your “business” account would only draw in the people who are either already in your industry or are already your clients. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s certainly more limiting.

Your personal side allows you to connect with your clients at a whole different level. Let’s face it; the more you know about your clients – and the more they know about you – the stronger your relationships become. While you may not want to call your clients every day to remind them of the services you provide, posting daily about your son’s game-winning pitch or your fun day on the lake reminds them you are there – and that you may share some common interests. When you intersperse fun pictures from your weekend with exciting new opportunities, it feels less like a sales pitch and more like another part of your personality.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from old high school buddies who now live nearby (I grew up in St. Louis), have kids the same ages as mine, or learned about a new movie or book I wanted to check out. At the same time, they’re hearing about Social Middleware from me. Keeping in touch and getting new business go hand in hand.

If you are looking for more information on this topic check out one of my previous posts, “Top social media myths in the financial industry” and hear what OnWallStreet has to say here.

And tell me what you think. Have you seen the lines of “personal” and “business” cross – in good ways – in your own social networks? How many times has a personal connection led to a business relationship?

Some of you reading this may wonder, what does email archiving have to do with social media? As it happens quite a lot. Email (and IM) archiving is nothing new. Regulated firms have been capturing, retaining and supervising email communications for the last 7-10 years. With the advent of social media and it’s growing importance in the financial industry, FINRA, the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States recently clarified it’s policies on the compliant use of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Notice 10-06 is giving firms the confidence to move forward with their social media plans but it also clearly dictates the need to define a social media policy, have a way to automate it and most importantly archive & supervise the activity.  While Socialware is a leader in social media policy automation and archiving we do not play in the email archiving space.

Why is the distinction important? Because, inevitably all of our customers want the same thing – an integrated solution to “messaging compliance.” This need will only accelerate with time as participation and the inevitable business use of sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook grows. The added benefit of managing policy and compliance from a single solution is that firms with established systems can adopt social media in a compliant fashion without having to create new business processes to manage the content and supervision on the backend.

Now, thanks to this partnership, if you are a Smarsh customer you can single-source an integrated solution to email, IM and social media archiving and compliance. If you are interested in learning more we encourage you to reach out to your Smarsh representative today.

1. Gartner Names Socialware Cool Vendor in Cloud Security Services for 2010 http://bit.ly/dqA2lB
2. RT @enterprises: Social media compliance extends beyond archiving http://bit.ly/9RS7jd
3. Advisor Spotlight: learn how one advisor is successfully using social media http://bit.ly/bqTGRu
4. Twitter 101 – A guide for businesses, awesome stuff http://bit.ly/HIMdO
5. Why You Should Advertise on Twitter http://adage.com/u/npAaRa
6. RobertHalfTech New Survey: Many CIOs Establish Stricter Social Networking Policies http://bit.ly/cJcEfy
7. 10 ways to use LinkedIn for business: http://bit.ly/chw5BE
8. Investment News: Making the most of social networking http://bit.ly/agQsMe

Some of the questions answered in the interview are:

- What is Social Middleware?
- How does it enable or help the Open Government directive?
- Is this something that empowers agencies to adopt Social Networks?
- Is this something that makes these tools more useful?

For answers to these questions and more click the play button below or listen to the interview on the Federal News Radio 1500 site.

Interview description
“As state and local governments move forward using Twitter and Facebook, questions are looming as to how to best use these new social media tools to reach private citizens. Social middleware is being used to help ward off the potential IT risks and compliance issues associated with using social media tools.”

You can listen to the recording (about 20 minutes long) by pressing play below.

As part of the podcast I addressed the following:

• A little bit about my past experience (boring but very short)
• What is Socialware? How long has it been around and what is the company’s mission? What is “social middleware” exactly? (getting to the good stuff)
• What sort of challenges did you see at Socialware when you joined the company and how did you go about formulating a marketing strategy to address those challenges?
• As a senior marketing executive, have you started to leverage “social media” into your overall marketing strategy. Can you tell us when and how you started to think about social media as a valuable, legitimate channel of communications?
• What do you see social media developing into? What are the trends you see as social media evolves and is adopted by more and more people?
• Given that your target market is marketing and communications professionals are you seeing people starting to use social media for applications other than influencer relations, such as lead generation or sales cycle support?

I want to thank Jeff again for inviting me to participate. Please have a listen and let me know what you think. Hopefully, I was able to share at least one interesting nugget for the marketing folks out there or those just interested in social media.

First you will notice a design and usability overhaul for choosing your mode of communication. With the new release you can easily choose your mode (Personal or Professional) via a dropdown. This is a change from the old “button” approach.

You will also notice that search has been added to the toolbar. This will enable you to search your data across all three social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). As far as we know there isn’t another solution on the market that gives you multi-platform archiving and search across all three popular social networking platforms.

Once you get into the search results you will notice a few features that will make it even easier to track down the information you need. First is the ability to filter your searches by social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) or by tag (personal vs. professional). In addition, all of your search terms are conveniently highlighted so you can quickly scan the content to find your information.

With Socialware you can export your entire social archive but you can also selectively export data. After completing a search you can click the XML Export button to quickly export those results.

Last, we should mention is the increased control over LinkedIn Recommendations and Tags, a new beta feature on the site. Stay tuned for more product updates and please let us know what you think about the new additions.

As Melinda Catapano points out in the article “if this is connected to official agency work, you better be able to produce that record.” But aren’t these consumer sites, just used for personal use? The answer is it depends. While the lines are blurring between personal and professional use on these sites one thing is clear. If you are using them to communicate agency work you can be assured that it is going to be governed by the same set of principles that govern other communications

In fact, Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen recently issued an opinion in which he states that electronic communications made by elected officials are public records, even when they are posted on social networking sites. Van Hollen states that the Wisconsin Public Records laws applies whenever the content is connected to the official’s purpose or function.

One option many agencies have employed is to simply block access to these sites. That course of action flies in the face of The President’s Open Government Directive.  These sites are the perfect platform to create transparency, participation and collaboration. The Bright Side of Government recently did a blog post that discusses this exact topic. Of course with increased levels of participation comes the need to comply with the federal guidelines such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Public Information Act.

Catapano admits that “she, like numerous other CIOs, didn’t have a clue as to how to archive external social networking posts”. She goes further by saying “it would probably be a good master’s thesis because everybody needs those answers and everybody seems to be avoiding the problem.”

Well there is good news Melinda. One you are not alone in that other industries are struggling with this same challenge. Here is a quick snapshot of the issues that financial services organizations face around embracing social networks.  Second, there actually is an automated solution to archiving social network activity and content. Socialware’s Risk Manager solution was built from the ground up to solve this problem and many others that can arise from business related usage of social networks.

Today we are currently working with a number of government agencies and look forward to sharing their success stories over the coming weeks and months. In the mean time if you are interested in signing up you can request a free invitation here.

I will be the first to say that policies are important when it comes to opening up the social web to your employees. But a word of caution, don’t stop after pressing the save button.  In a recent report from Deloitte they posed the question to employees “what is your company’s policy when it comes to use of social networking channels”? Here were the responses:

• 26% – There are specific guidelines as to what you can and cannot say online in relations to the company and/or client matter
• 7% – The policy is to use your discretion when it comes to posting comments and opinions on the world wide web and social networking sites
• 11% – There is a policy, but I don’t know what it is
• 23% – There is no policy
• 24% – Don’t know if there is a policy

Note that 58% either don’t have a policy or don’t know what it is. This should be concerning. After all if your company believes it’s important enough to create a policy isn’t it just as critical to ensure the policy is followed? On that topic how will you monitor it to ensure compliance? In regulated industries like financial services and government this is even more critical as regulators require that certain activity be captured and archived.

The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA) recently published a great resource titled “Creating a Social Web Policy for Your Independent Agency”.  The report offers some very good recommendations and detailed steps on how to go about creating a social media policy. However, there are two recommendations that I would like to expand on.

The first is related to “compliance with federal and state discovery, document retention and other laws and agency procedures.” In the guide they state “employees should copy and paste any client specific social media communication into the agency management system and record an activity in the same manner they would in using other media.”  While that is one way to capture and retain the data it is enormously unproductive and it also raises questions around completeness of the archive.

What happens if someone forgets to take these steps or decides they simply don’t want to? A better approach would be to leverage automated solutions, like our Risk Manager product as an example, that sits between the end user and the social networks to automatically capture and retain the content. Not only will this eliminate the manual work around data capture and retention but it also guarantees completeness.

The second is around advertising statutes and regulations. They correctly state that “social media posts are communications subject to various federal and state laws/regulations, including characterization as advertising under some state laws, so employees should make sure they are complying with all such laws in using social media.” This is correct. The detail that is missing though is how you will comply in this new environment. Again I’ll go back to our Risk Manager product as a mechanism to help ensure compliance on this point and many others.

I encourage you to download the IIABA report if you have not created your social media policy. If you are looking for more information on how the FINRA/SEC rules impact social network use you should take a look at this summary as well. Last be sure you have the tools in place to make it as easy as possible for your employees to meet the policy and compliance guidelines as they start to use these powerful sites.

Cisco

Here are a few of the study highlights.

The first set of findings point to the increased use and integration of consumer-based social networking tools in the enterprise.

“75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.”

This part is old news. Organizations are racing to adopt social networking and microblogging tools to help drive the business and it seems there is a new article about it every day.

“Social networking tools are spreading into core areas of the value chain, including the marketing and communications, human relations, and customer service departments.”

Organizations are now moving beyond social networking silos. They’ve already proven there is value in tapping these tools as stand alone solutions and now they are looking for ways to integrate social into their enterprise processes and systems.  This is the next big wave.

While usage and integration is skyrocketing, companies have been lax in regards to governance and involving IT in their decisions.  Ultimately, this creates a great deal of risk and exposure.

“Only 1 in 7 companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.”

This is likely a result of the unbridled growth of these tools and all the buzz associated with them.  But like any good business decision, companies need to step back, understand what they are trying to achieve, evaluate the risks and put the tools in place to manage the program. I will say that the companies we’ve been working with in regulated industries are taking a very programmatic approach to adopting social.  While other industries may not face the same challenges they can learn a lot from these institutions.

“Only 1 in 5 participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.”

This point has come up before.  If you fall in this camp be sure to check out this list of sample social media policies.  As of today there are over 115 examples.  In addition, here is a great list of government related social media policies.

Be careful in thinking that a policy alone is all you need.  Deloitte found in an Ethics & Workplace Survey that 49% of employees say a company policy won’t change how they behave online. As a result you should evaluate tools to help you monitor activity to protect your employees and your brand.

“Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other, more structured areas (for example, information technology) often doesn’t work for social networking.”

Until recently companies have had two choices when it comes to social networking sites. Open the floodgates or completely block access. Since these are consumers sites there are no built in management controls for the enterprise. This is one reason why social middleware has become such a hot topic.  With it companies can apply structure, define policies, control access and protect their brand on these open, consumer sites.

“Businesses also find difficulty in striking the right balance between the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some degree of corporate oversight.”

We hear this a lot from our clients as well.  On Twitter users can easily create multiple personas.  However, on Facebook and LinkedIn you are only allowed a single account under their terms of use.  As a result there is no way to separate your personal activity from the professional on these sites.

Again the need for social middleware becomes clear.  Adopting this middle layer creates the ability for employees to choose whether or not content is personal vs. professional.  As a result companies can implement policies that give employees the ability to choose what category the content falls under and as a result how that content will be monitored, retained and managed by the enterprise.

“Only 1 in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although the IT department is typically not involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.”

There are two items of note here. First for companies to realize the full benefits of these tools they will need direct integration to their people, processes and systems. Building loose connections in a one-off manner to each of these sites it not the answer.  IT will want a single point of integration to marry enterprise processes with the top sites of today and those that will be the next Facebook tomorrow.

The second reason it is critical to involve IT is that these sites have a very real impact on the infrastructure of the enterprise. A report from Blue Coat noted “a company based in the US was having problems connecting with its South Africa office” due to the fact that “the bandwidth on its WAN link was completely consumed and it found that 75% of that traffic was Facebook.”

Of course blocking access is not the answer. In that same report they highlighted a customer that “blocked Facebook and within 48 hours they had to unblock it.  Marketing and HR had complained that it was critical to them getting the job done.”

There has to be a happy medium.  Companies will be forced to open up access to these tools but at the same time they need to manage that access.  One solution to the bandwidth problem is to govern access to those parts of the site that consume the most, like videos and photos.  This way you meet the needs of the business by giving access while not crippling the rest of the network.

In addition to the analysis in the report there are some great perspectives by industry leaders on why adopting these social tools will ultimately be a driver of success and competitive advantage.

“Companies who will succeed in embracing the tremendous power of social networking will be those who design a collaborative IT architecture capable of supporting the use of these technologies and mitigating the risks they pose.”
Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cisco Services

“Businesses need to embrace social media not only to remain competitive, but also to continue to attract top talent. The next generation of leaders will be exceptionally savvy with these tools, so 3M is using social media externally to help us with recruiting. Several of the graduates we hired this year specifically told us that they hadn’t considered 3M before they saw our employer profile on social media.”
Hugh Murphy, e-Channels, 3M U.K. and Ireland

Thanks Cisco for a great report on a hot topic. I’m looking forward to part 2.