While the Marines are busy banning social media and some corporations are clamping down on Twitter and its ilk, the state government of California is encouraging its workers to embrace Web 2.0.

California officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

On Feb. 26, the state officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

The state issued a policy that sets clear rules for its use, including a limitation to only authorized users who have been trained regarding their roles, responsibilities and security risks. (View a PDF of the policy here.)

The document states: “State agencies are encouraged to use social media technologies to engage their customers and employees. Many state entities, including the Governor, have used these communication channels with great success but as with most technologies, there is a measure of risk that must be addressed and mitigated.”

In addition to the policy, the state issued a five-page “Social Media Standard,” which includes a few interesting clauses (read the full document in PDF form here):

No. 8: “Users shall not utilize tools or techniques to spoof, masquerade, or assume any identity or credentials except for legitimate law enforcement purposes, or for other legitimate State purposes as defined in agency policy.”

No. 9: “Users shall avoid mixing their professional information with their personal information.”

And, No. 10: “Users shall not use their work password on social media web sites.”

Participating agencies must comply with the policy by July 1.

Related reading: “What We’re Reading: If  Harvard Says So Edition” | “Social Media: The Elephant in the Office”

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admin Social Media California, CIO, FACEBOOK, Farmville, government, Social Media, the Marines, Twitter, YouTube

We may very well be embarking on the decade of the customer. Social media, especially Twitter, has empowered customers, and the recession has reminded businesses that keeping clients is easier than bringing in new ones.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies. Read more…

admin Customer Service AARP, CIO.com, Customer Service, Dell, Emily Yellin, FACEBOOK, JetBlue, Outsourcing, Twitter, Zappos

It’s that time of year when we look back on what was and ponder what is to come. The year 2009 brought a number of significant tech developments — the iPhone as a legitimate business tool (AT&T’s bandwidth issues notwithstanding); the Cloud’s emergence; grandmothers embracing social media; Windows 7 — all of which promise to change the way we work.

Still, all our readers cared about was learning how to use a secondary axis in Excel, how to change BlackBerry calendar views, and why help desk techs are so surly.

Here’s a list of our top 10 posts from 2009. Read and enjoy.

10. Get It Together: 5 Ways to Stay Organized in Outlook
9. 5 Lessons to Learn Before Outsourcing
8. A Kinder, Gentler Help Desk
7. Top 5 Most-Asked Help Desk Questions
6. 7 Productivity-Boosting iPhone Tips
5. Out of Office, Out of Mind
4. How the Help Desk Earns its Bad Reputation
3. Follow the Format: 5 MS Word Tips for Managers
2. 4 BlackBerry Tips Every Manager Should Know
1. Management Tool Best Practices: 3 Excel Tips that Promise Charting Greatness

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admin Year in Review BlackBerry, Excel, FACEBOOK, How To, iPhone, Outlook, Social Media, the Cloud, tips and tricks, Twitter, Windows Mobile

Last week’s two-hour Twitter outage was inconvenient for some, devastating to others. Whether it affected you at all is irrelevant; it proved that social media has become omnipresent.

I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.

Here are highlights from this week’s stories:

Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.

CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty. Read more…

admin Social Media FACEBOOK, productivity, Twitter, U.S. Marines

If you think Twitter, and social media in general, is a fad, think again. Not only has the number of unique visitors to Twitter increased exponentially in the past year, the percentage of people who use it only at work is double that of those who use it only at home.

According to a recent study by Nielsen Research, Twitter saw a 1,382 percent growth from February 2008 to February 2009*. What’s more, 62 percent of respondents said they access Twitter from work only; 35 percent access it from home only.

This is what we do know: Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and MySpace…) is wildly popular, and is used mostly at work. What’s unclear, however, is how to manage it in the enterprise.

Your options include ignoring it and blocking its use, or devising a plan that teaches employees how to use it without sullying your brand or exposing the company to security breaches. Read more…

admin Social Media CIO, FACEBOOK, LinkedIn, MySpace, Nielsen, productivity, Sophos, Twitter

I cannot say if productivity was a watchword 10 years ago, when salaries were fat and perks were plenty. It’s definitely on everyone’s minds these days though, when many companies have smaller staff and employees have fatter workloads.

Throw social networking and other electronic communications like e-mail and instant messaging into the mix, and productivity becomes a greater challenge for employees.

In particular, the study found that those who IMed frequently with their bosses were more productive than those who didn’t.

Well, that’s what conventional wisdom says.

MIT and IBM present a different case. In a study published in April, researchers at the two institutions found that instant messaging and other forms of constant communication actually increase employees’ productivity levels. Another win for Chatty Cathy. (For Win 1, see the post “Facebook Addicts + YouTubers = Sharper Employees?“)

According to an article by Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, the researchers analyzed the e-mail traffic, buddy lists and social networking friends of 2,600 IBM consultants over 12 months. They compared the consultants’ communication patterns against their performance in billable hours. Those who maintained constant communications averaged an increase in revenue of $588 per month over the average, while those who did not produced $98 per month less than the average. Read more…

admin Outsourcing, ROI, Worker Productivity Ars Technica, FACEBOOK, IBM, Jacqui Cheng, MIT, Mobile Devices, YouTube

Workers quietly rejoice when stories like this one from Reuters hit the newswires: “Facebook, YouTube at work make better employees: study.” It excuses their WILB-ing, or “workplace Internet leisure browsing,” and may even assuage some of the guilt they feel after taking their fourth “Which Osbourne are you?” quiz. Read more…

admin Worker Productivity CIO, FACEBOOK, recession, ROI, WILB, Worker Productivity, YouTube