Why block Facebook when it increasingly offers valuable work-related resources?

I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual on Facebook lately. Two recently formed groups are the culprits. Both are work-related. The first is the home to a largely intellectual discussion of how Wikipedia can work more closely with official representatives of organizations to ensure their companies’ entries are accurate and up-to-date. Wikipedia’s founder and Wikia owner Jimmy Wales has joined the closed group and the discussions with him have been mostly respectful, with information and ideas moving in both directions. Edelman Digital Senior Vice President Phil Gomes started the group after posting an open letter to Wales about… Read More »

Get control now of proliferating social media activities: Altimeter report

A few years back, in working with an organization to organize its social media efforts under a strategy, we found that the company had over 50 Facebook pages and groups. Most had fewer than a dozen or so fans, most likely because nobody was supporting these pages with content and interaction. Ultimately, we winnowed the number down to the five or six pages that had amassed some genuine interest and to which the organization was willing to commit the resources required to maintain and build momentum.

Today, 50 pages no longer seems like all that big a deal. According to a report The Altimeter Group released today, global corporations… Read More »

Curating company news: Time for company content curation to grow up

There’s plenty of evidence that business is adopting content curation, but the practice hasn’t been around long enough for organizations to innovate more targeted, results-focused uses.

Business takes many of its lessons from how everyone else makes use of social tools. To start applying content curation, communicators need to pay attention to how others are using the crop of curation tools that have found acceptance online. There are dozens of free tools, but Storify is the one that has demonstrated one of curation’s emerging strengths:

Curating news that the media isn’t covering can lead to media coverage. And, by extension, it can… Read More »

Apple’s social media policy is just as closed as the rest of the company

Back in 2005, when IBM first encouraged its employees to blog publicly about their work, the company explained the initiative in part by noting that no marketing campaign could evangelize the company’s work better than its own employees.

In recent years, it has become more and more common for organizations to find ways to get employees into the social media space to represent the company. Coca-Cola has a certification program. Dell has its Social Media and Communities (SMaC) group. Sprint has its Ninjas. And virtually every social media policy you see—hundreds of which are posted publicly—includes a clause instructing employees… Read More »

Pharmas: Cry-babies, social media resisters or victims of unclear regulatory guidance?

Without explanation beyond encouraging “an authentic dialogue,” Facebook has reversed a policy that allowed pharmaceutical companies proactively moderate wall comments, deciding which they would move forward and which they would delete. As a result, several pharmas—Astra Zeneca, for example, and Bayer. Others, like Amgen, suspended their plans to introduce pages.

The change does not apply to product-specific pages, but it does affect pages dedicated to conditions. In other words, a company making a diabetic drug can still proactively moderate comments on the page for the drug, but not on its page about “Healthy Living with Diabetes.”

… Read More »

Cisco Systems embraces “media company” concept with launch of The Network

Cisco Systems may be under seige by investors—including no less than Ralph Nader—but at nobody can blame the company’s communications team of failing to do its part.

Earlier this month, Cisco relaunched its corporate news site with a new name— The Network—and a new approach to sharing news and information. “A piece of content that is shared with a friend, or friends, or followers, or the world is the ultimate measurement of its success,” according to social media team leader John Earnhardt, writing on the Cisco blog, The Platform. “That person is validating that the piece of content they are sharing was valuable enough, interesting… Read More »

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