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General Information
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May 7, 2010
• Vol.32 Issue 10
Page(s) 10 in print issue
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Social Media Successes
Establishing Strong, Effective Policies Is Key To Joining The Social Media Scene
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| Key Points
• As employees bring Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn into the office, IT must define how to safely integrate these tools and processes into existing workflows without compromising security or competitiveness.
• IT must work with the business to understand its long-term goals. Social media policy will flow out of this and help achieve the levels of efficiency and effectiveness needed to reach these goals.
• Social networking can potentially expose corporate information to hackers and criminals. Implement a policy framework to reinforce proper behaviors and keep the right information in the right hands. | | Organizations in all sectors are increasingly finding their internal and external communications influenced by social media tools and practices. This is being driven largely by growing use of consumer-focused social networking tools within the workplace. A recent study released by Cisco reinforces the growth of these tools in the workplace: Three-quarters of survey respondents use consumer-based social media tools within the enterprise, and about half of them are also using micro-blogging extensively. As employees lean more heavily on these platforms in their private lives, they inevitably bring them to the office—and in the process, expect IT to integrate them into existing solutions.
 However, becoming Facebook-, Twitter-, and blog-friendly isn’t a simple matter of granting staff full access to these services. Don’t dive in without first creating a social media strategy that both aligns with and supports current and projected IT and business goals.
 Frameworks Are Key
Despite the key benefits of broader social media integration—including greater levels of collaboration, increased agility, and greater customer responsiveness—IT and business leaders are challenged by an ongoing lack of governance. Only one in seven respondents to the Cisco survey had a formal process in place to guide implementation of consumer social media tools within the enterprise. About 20% had acceptable use policies in place. A pitfall for IT lies in the assumption that social media policy and practice revolves around the tools themselves. It doesn’t.
“Bringing social media tools into the enterprise shouldn’t be the end goal,” says Wendy Steinle, a marketing director with Novell (www.novell.com). “Stay focused on the goal of helping the organization reach a breakthrough in efficiency and better business outcomes.”
Once the outcomes are clearly established, Steinle says the organization can work backward from there—a process that may lead to a need for a combination of new social messaging technologies.
Solutions May Already Be In Place
Adapting existing communication strategies can help companies reverse-engineer outcomes and requisite tools and processes. Although most organizations believe they need to reinvent the wheel when pursuing greater social media maturity, the truth is the answers for successful implementation are already in place.
"IT should not be treating the social channel as this entirely different beast," says Craig Robinson, chief operating officer at GlobalSCAPE (www.globalscape.com). “Yes, it does have unique attributes and raises unique concerns. But so does every other type of communication channel. From a strategy, policy, process, and technology perspective, it should be treated as part of the whole.”
As is often the case with technology-related projects, organizations are at risk of forgetting the softer implications of these implementations.
“A lot of the risks encountered in a social media roll-out are not technical in nature but content-related,” says Doug Mow, senior vice president of marketing at Virtusa (www.virtusa.com), a business consulting and IT outsourcing company. “For example, public companies have to be very careful with inside information and disclosure. The online policies are no different than the normal policies, but the penalties for non-compliance can be magnified many times over in the online world.”
Understand The Current Policy Landscape
To ensure that social media use among employees doesn’t place the organization or its technologies at unnecessary risk, Mow recommends proactively reviewing existing policies and workflow. Identify storage strategies and policies for each specific area of content and estimate server and bandwidth requirements to ensure employees get the most out of their newfound social capabilities.
“IT policies can inhibit the social media strategy,” says Mow. “For example, organizations whose network policies prohibit social media access need to modify those policies before the social media launch.”
The risks extend well beyond the employees themselves. Social media platforms make it relatively easy for employees to publish a broad range of often-sensitive information, including seemingly innocuous things such as names, titles, supervisors, job descriptions, and contact information, to an equally broad audience.
“Criminals can use this information to target individuals within the company with phishing attacks or to send packages to try to harm their systems or the corporate network,” says Anthony Blakemore, principal security consultant with Accuvant Labs (www.accuvant.com). “This risk can be mitigated through strong user awareness policies and education that teaches employees about current threats so they know how to respond to links and emails and handle email attachments.”
A Plan Of Attack
For organizations hoping to safely integrate social media into their operations, Virtusa’s Mow recommends the following process:
• Engage the sponsoring business community. IT must develop an in-depth understanding of the business area’s social media programs and their anticipated impact as well as the programs’ overall goals and definitions of success.
• Determine policy issues. Review organizational policies surrounding behaviors, disclosure, and system accesses and modify them to ensure that they still make sense in a social media-enabled environment.
• Consider a pilot. Select experienced professionals whose online behavior will not create issues.
• Roll it out. Keep all programs precise, explicitly documented, and internally marketed. Establish clear expectations to minimize the potential for losing control.
• Modify guidelines and expand. As social media learning becomes more in-grained within IT, extend availability to wider audiences and apply what is learned along the way. 
by Carmi Levy
Top Tip: Start With The Users
Ask employees about their collaborative needs and take the time to observe how they use current technology. Craig Robinson, GlobalSCAPE’s chief operating officer (www.globalscape.com), says user-level input is a powerful place to begin.
“Use this information to determine new social channels that you need to introduce or manage for users to be more effective,” he says. “Then make your own business case, in business terms, so non-IT executives do not need to sift through the technical jargon to develop the case for you.” |
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