A recent report suggests that businesses are trying hard to block access to social networking:

[via press release

The survey was developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of information technology (IT) professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm. It was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.

CIOs were asked, “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?” Their responses:

Prohibited completely 54%
Permitted for business purposes only 19%
Permitted for limited personal use 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use 10%
Don’t know/no answer 1%

I am not surprised by the attempt at blocking access. Businesses view us as parts of the corporate machinery, and our reason for existence is to work on behalf of the company. That’s why we get so little vacation time, sick leave, and maternity/paternity leave in comparison to other nations.

Here, only 19% will even allow use for business uses, only!

Of course, there is nothing to stop people from using their phones to remain connected on these services if the companies block them at the firewall. This is an escape hatch, but still a pain.

In a world where social networks are increasingly playing the role of early warming system and primary information resource, organizations that impose these sorts of draconian solutions will suffer, not benefit.

I’m thrilled to announce that Bert Sandie (@bsandie) from Electronic Arts is going to present a case study at E2 San Francisco. Bert is Director - Technical Excellence (cool title) and is tasked with driving EA’s internal social networking, knowledge management solutions, collaboration and innovation. Bert spoke on a Microsoft customer panel at our Boston event and got great reviews.

Our agenda of case studies and customer speakers is growing and now includes:

• Electronic Arts
• Nike
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Kaiser Permanente
• Medtronic
• Metlife
• Eli Lilly
• CSC
• EMC
• Alcatel-Lucent

Here is the session Bert will present in November:

Collaboration 2.0 inside Electronic Arts
The presentation will provide insight into EA’s internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.

Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.

Congratulations Bert!

A couple of interesting data points:

• A new Pew study notes that the Interent isn’t really changing who participates in politics, but Pew notes that blogs and social networking sites are seeing growing political activity.
• Brendan Nyhan on his blog points to efforts underway to leverage social computing to improve political polling

There’s all sorts of implications here from the Enterprise 2.0 perspective, not only the potential to use social computing for data gathering, but also the potential risks of employees using their public social networks to promote political views that may be contrary to their employer.
I’m curious to hear if any companies are implementing any guidelines on how employees use their personal social networks?

Initially posted on CloudAve - home of specialist cloud computing and SaaS commentary

From the program - Social media is all the rage in the consumer world and with some of the world’s leading consumer brands. Now businesses of all types and sizes are exploring the use of social media both for internal purposes and as a communications conduit to the outside world. But do the same principals and lessons learned from the consumer world apply to businesses? It’s time to get serious about social media adoption in business and ask the tough questions. What are we trying to achieve? Can social media possibly scale for enterprise consumption? How has social media proven effective and how are we measuring its effectiveness?

Peter Kim, Senior Partner, Dachis Corporation
Ben Foster, Strategy and Content Manager, Allstate Life Insurance
Greg Matthews, Director, Consumer Innovations, Humana
Morgan Johnston, Manager Corporate Communications, JetBlue Airways

Social media sometimes is a tool to solve a problem that doesn’t exist – a cure chasing tool. Allstate has department called and for social.. and feels a need to use the tools to partner with organisations to asses where problems lie. Social media is a great tool within Jet Blue for;

• Real time “taking the pulse” of the feeling of the community
• Engaging with the community
• The ability to inform (730k Twitter followers helps!)
• Humanising the company

Humana is trying to reinvent themselves as a health – company more than just a healthcare company – social media and marketing helps them to innovate and find the bleeding edge ideas that will help transform the company. They created a site to gather some ideas – most of which will never see the light of day but some that might.

How do we incentivise and enable collaboration within an organisation? How to make it part of the fabric of the company? Enterprise 2.0 helps with this, embedding the tools that enable the cultural shift within an organisation – give the tools to the staff and stand back ie not try and control the use of them.

Two emerging areas where enterprise 2.0 stuff matters: customer service and innovation/new product development. Tension between top down and bottom up – also a company like Humana needs to be very aware of privacy with regards customer records so approaches it more by creating separate externally facing tools that don’t connect directly with internal data.

In development their is always tension between IT and the social media evangelists – need to get people in the same room to talk about their relative perspectives. It’s hard for IT given that as soon as something goes wrong they get nailed – and in a modern, social media driven world rapid development doesn’t sit particularly well with the traditional IT perspective (scope, develop, test, release) – need to deal with the concerns from both sides.

Things are merging – IT conferences talk about social, PR conferences talk about social. Social media is becoming the hub around whic

Hiya all! A quick blog post to let everyone know that we’re putting more fuel into our Twitter account - @e2conf

Please follow us if you’d like to get 140-characters of info about the enterprise 2.0 industry. And we want to hear from you. Please DM us with any inquiries or @ us any links to information, articles, blog posts, or other tidbits of interest you want us to share with the enterprise 2.0 community. We’ll retweet whatever we catch (as long as it’s relevant).

You can also find us on Facebook - our wall is a great place for you to post information about your company, self, interests, jobs (needed or wanted).

The same goes for MyE2 - the conference social network we launched last week. (But you’ve got to be registered for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference to have access.)

You can also always leave a comment here on this blog - we’re keeping tabs on it all.

Have a great week folks!

~ Janetti aka @janerri

Your Enterprise 2.0 Conference Community Manager

Are you registered for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference coming up this June in Boston? If so, join the Enterprise 2.0 community site and network, network, network.

With your registration to this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference you also have access to MyE2, the conference community site and social network where attendees can meet and connect.

The MyE2 site was designed specifically for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference so comes with custom features that will improve your experience before, during and after the event:

Your Profile
Once you log in be sure to upload an avatar picture and fill out your profile fields. This will help other attendees search for you and find out who you are. Show your personal tags and history or simply share your LinkedIn, Facebook and blog URLs. To get your photos and Tweets added to your profile page, please update your Twitter ID and photo sharing RSS in the settings tab. View your public profile via the “My Page” tab, the direct link is http://my.e2conf.com/account/settings/profile/

Official Conference Tag (#e2conf)
Tag your Tweets or Flickr photos with e2conf and they’ll be pulled into our public event streams for everyone to see. Tagged tweets will also get pulled into the MyE2 homepage in real-time for community activity updates.

Member Search & Messaging

To message someone, you must first add them as a friend. Locate their profile in “Member Search”, and click on “Add to friends” on their profile page. Once they accept your invitation you can send them private messages.

To compose a new message, start in the ‘Account’ tab. Once there you can also set your email alerts for when people send you messages. If you choose to get email alerts, please be sure to whitelist webmaster@e2conf.com to avoid spam filtering.

Forums
Use the forums feature to start discussions around your topics of interest. The Enterprise 2.0 team has already set up a few initial forums to help you get started, including details about hotel and travel discounts. Check it out at my.e2conf.com/forum and add your topic to the mix.

The Backchannel
The Backchannel is a way for you to talk to other attendees while in a conference session. It allows attendees to surface their thoughts, communicate reactions, add context or expand upon something the speaker said, and so on.

For participating in and tracking conversations feel free to use the Meebo chat room or Twitter, both updated in real time on the backchannel page. By using the official #e2conf Twitter tag, along with the session-specific tags provided on-site, attendees can stay in the know about what’s happening throughout the conference.

Schedule Builder
Get the most out of all the sessions and activities taking place at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference by pre-planning your event schedule. Search through the program and click the orange plus sign for details and then ‘Add this session to your schedule.’ Having a personalized schedule before you get on-site will help you stay focused on the content that’s most appealing to you, while giving you more time to network and meet fellow attendees in person.

ACTIVATING YOUR ACCOUNT
If you did not activate your MyE2 account alongside registration, you will find a link on the MyE2 homepage (my.e2conf.com) . Please use your Enterprise 2.0 Conference registration login details for MyE2. If you forgot your password, please go to http://my.e2conf.com/forgotpass for assistance or see our activation page for more details.

~ ~ ~
If you have questions or feedback about the MyE2 site, please let our webmaster know via adunne@techweb.com. It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be working on it through the show. MyE2 was built for your use so we welcome you to tell us how to make it better.

* Note: hyperlinks included in this post require you to have a MyE2 or Enterprise 2.0 Conference registration login.

For those brand managers seeking advice on how to build a fan base around your company’s Facebook page/ public profile, the folks over at Facebook just posted a perky video from Wildfire Interactive advising how to drive your number of fans up and create a movement within the network.

There’s also an intriguing case study from Adobe that’s worth reading. Bottom line - providing your fanbase with the opportunity to interact via promotions, giveaways or contests will lead to more community enthusiasm and perpetuate the viral nature of Facebook.

According to a Network World Survey (583 respondents) -

A third of IT pros use sites like LinkedIN, Facebook and Slashdot for both work and play. This compares to 37% who use them mostly for work and 29% who use them mostly for play.

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/020209-social-net-survey.html?netht=rn_020509&nladname=020509dailynewspmal#slide6

Over on NoJitter Eric Krapf discusses a recent Economist article and uses the points in that article as a discussion point for how the change in the economy might affect collaboration tools such as social networking, noting that while access to social networking tools might no longer be used as an incentive to lure young college graduates in a competitive job market, social networking tools now play perhaps a larger role in fostering communication and collaboration than ever before.

Continue Reading »

Great videos in plain English…

What is social bookmarking?

What is Twitter?