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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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.

Here are a few numbers from the AARP piece: According to Yellin, Americans contact customer service 143 times per year, or 2 to 3 times per week, on average. The average cost to companies with an American-based call center is about $7.50 per call. Outsourcing to another country knocks the price down to $2.35 per call, and letting customers take care of the issue themselves through an automated system drops it to about 32 cents per call.

The AARP reporter asked Yellin about the declining quality of customer service. Here’s her response: “What has happened increasingly, especially in the last five years, is that many companies haven’t paid attention to customer service and continue to view the success of a call center from their own viewpoint — as a cost whose success is based on the number of calls they can handle in an hour.”

Bingo. Just because a outsourcer can take thousands of calls a month at a bargain price doesn’t mean they can actually resolve issues. Bye-bye company cost savings, hello customer (and employee) rage.

This is where the new technology comes in. In the past, miffed customers had few outlets for their rage. Today, they have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a horde of sites that encourage commenting and reviews. A company can only ignore criticism for so long.

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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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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.

“For every employee that accidentally leaks a business deal on Twitter,” Lynch wrote, “four others connect with people that day who bring in new business.”

Lynch wasn’t as harsh on the military as we were. While he pointed out social networking’s potential for keeping the ranks in touch with family and friends, he conceded that the Marine Corps had good reasons for banning it.

Study Time
Two studies of note came out in the past few weeks. One, from Proofpoint Inc., found that 34 percent of American companies have been hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past year, and 45 percent are worried about such information being leaked via Facebook and Twitter.

Another study, by Nucleus Research, offers up some scary stats for managers:

• 77 percent of workers have a Facebook account
• Of those with accounts, almost two-thirds access Facebook during business hours
• 87 percent of them couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it

If there’s one takeaway from these two studies, it’s that companies should stop ignoring social media. Whether they choose to embrace it (think Zappos) or do the equivalent of covering their ears while repeating “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you” (the Marines, see above entry), it must be addressed.

Social Media: The New Drug
Borrowing a concept from the smartphone realm, Computerworld quoted a source in an article last week who declared that the public has become addicted to “social media crack.” The mag ran a piece about Twitter’s Aug. 6 outage, and addressed the effect the two-hour lull had on users.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters. That’s what Computerworld says, and that’s what experts say. If people are so smitten with a new technology, one that has the power to boost business, why wouldn’t you figure out how to use it to your company’s advantage? Not doing so is just silly. (Jen Darr)

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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.

If you are like half of the companies out there**, you have opted to ban it, which is akin to believing that if you cannot see something, it isn’t there. That worked — sort of — when you were a kid hiding under the covers from monsters, but it doesn’t now.

That worked — sort of — when you were a kid hiding under the covers from monsters, but it doesn’t now.

Social media is here, indeed, and if you aren’t managing it, your employees are. And most likely they are fumbling around with the new technology, asking their colleagues for help, or spending unnecessary hours trying to understand hashtags and TweetDeck. It’s not the technology that’s draining your workers’ productivity; it’s the lack of understanding it that is.

(We won’t even examine the damage that untamed tweeting can do to your brand and data security. That’s another post.)

More and more companies are recognizing social media’s value — so much so that it’s quickly becoming a vital component of any business. Will you fear it or embrace it? (Jen Darr)

If you choose the latter, here are some how-to mini-videos to get you started:

• Tweeting from your cell phone
• Direct Messages versus @Replies
• My link is too long for the 140-character Twitter limit… what can I do?
  
• Replying to someone on Twitter
• What is RT and Fail Whale on Twitter?
• Using favorites on Twitter
• Why can’t I Direct Message (DM) on Twitter?
• Trending topics on Twitter
• Making your Twitter account private

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*According to a Nielsen report published in February 2009.
**In a survey conducted by security firm Sophos, 50 percent of respondents said their company blocked or restricted use of sites like Facebook.

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.

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

The debate will no doubt continue, but this study’s implications highlight the importance of keeping an open mind. For example, when our productivity advisers engage IT leaders in conversations about the pain points or support gaps within their companies, we rarely hear about a strong need for mobile device support.

When asked where their customers go for this type of support, common responses are “they support themselves,” or “call volume is too low, therefore not worth our money to seek an outsourcer or train our staff on this type of support.”

And therein lies the dilemma. Recent studies prove that using tools like IM and mobile devices (or any application or tool that provides instant access to work) are effective and increase productivity, but IT leaders don’t believe that investing in support for these tools makes sense or is worth it.

Perhaps we can take MIT and IBM’s study a step further and ask how many of these end-users consider themselves advanced users. Imagine the productivity gains if they all were. What would those dollars look like? Tell us your thoughts on the gains or losses of supporting mobile devices. (Jen Darr)

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According to the study’s author, a little WILB-ing here and there sharpens employees’ concentration, which is better for a company in the end.

A little WILB-ing sharpens concentration, researchers find.

While the Reuters story may seem like fluffy page-filler – anything involving Facebook or YouTube is not considered “serious news” –  it does bring up an important issue. That is, that many companies miss the point when it comes to maximizing worker productivity. While said companies are spending millions of dollars on software blockers to prevent WILB-ing, they scrimp when it comes to giving employees the tools to get their jobs done (and many people today are doing the jobs of two or three). 

If you throw the job of two at someone who used to work 50 hours a week at one, what can you expect? Surely not efficiency. And if you require employees to use specific software and processes but don’t offer training and support, what then can you expect? Definitely not sharp tacks.

Until employees are viewed as not just workers but capital that needs nurture, they, as an investment, will yield no return.

I’m not advocating mandatory Facebook Breaks or on-the-clock YouTube Me Time, but I am excited that our sour economy has forced a hard look at business practices. (Jen Darr)

How has the economy changed your company’s emphasis on worker productivity? Tell us in Comments.

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