Tag Archives: Social network

Why You Should Have a Social Network Company Policy

Raise your hand if you have either a Facebook profile, a Twitter handle, a LinkedIn account or if you just got an invitaion on Google Plus, and you accessed any of them, at least once, from work.

Does your company have a company policy regarding social networking? It seems only 55% percent of the companies do, according to a survey by the International Labor & Employment Group at Proskauer Rose.

I always wondered how Social Networks are impacting our life, and this SocialNetConomy blog investigates on this topic. Surely, in my opinion, social networks have a huge impact on business. They of course have both a positive impact (when we think about companies whose visibility and marketing efforts on social networks made the companies earn good profits, saving jobs and helping the economy), and a negative impact (check my post on the correlation of Facebook visits growth and GDP decline in the US in the past 5 years).

According to Proskauer, survey data show more than three-quarters of responders use social networking for business, and some 40% of the businesses in the survey have had to deal with employees misusing social networks.

The figure below shows that 25% of companies have a strict social network policy, with filters preventing all employees to access social networks. Some 26.7% of companies allow access to select employees.

Source: Proskauer Survey 2011

Source: Proskauer survey 2011

Interesting enough, survey findings show that out of the 55% of the interviewed companies with a social network company policy in place, some 16.5% say their policy is for working hours only. Virtually, this means employees can lament about their company – hence negatively impact their company brand- if they do it when they are not working.

Considerations:

Why shall you care about having a social media policy?

Social networks, like it or not, affect brand reputation. In my opinion, having a social media policy in place should be one of the most important pages of the employee handbook of every company. Not only: a social media policy should be on the use of social media regardless of where it’s used and if employees have access to it or not from work.

The more a company brand is visible, the more that company should have a social media presence and a social network policy. Morgan Stanley as first large financial firm got his advisers use social networks (with a policy in place).

More and more surveys on social networks and business reveal that not all companies have understood the importance – also in terms of brand reputation and seniority of those in charge of social media. In a recent post I highlighted only half of the major websites have social media buttons on their home.

We are surely at the beginning of the adoption curve of social media, but, as I wrote a long ago, in times of global economic uncertainty, understanding and anticipating trends is critical for maintaining your competitive advantage.

Who should be in charge of your social media policy?

Surely it’s a teamwork between your marketing department, your HR and your legal department (if you have one), with some little work from your IT department.

Related posts:

Facebook’s new users decline after the launch of Google+, while the two companies fight a new “War of the Roses”

It seems Google+ and Facebook have started some sort of “cold war”, with Google preventing a former employee (now with Facebook) to add more people to his circles, and Facebook blocking Google+ ads on its social network, while media and social media experts start showing their preference by publishing either too positive or too negative articles about G+.  Some independent forums also are not liking some form of censorship in G+.

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in "The War of the Roses" (1989)

While the new “War of the Roses” goes on, I was wondering how Google plus is affecting – or may be affecting- current and forthcoming marketing efforts.

While some sources say that a good number of companies are in line waiting to build their company pages on Google+, I was thinking of those whose marketing dollars have been invested in Facebook already:

- Is there any risk companies should evaluate when deciding about their social media marketing dollars?

- Are there countries where Facebook-based marketing campaigns could be at risk?

- are there countries whose Facebook campaigns are “safer” and not impacted by a migration of fans to G+?

In order to answer these questions, I started comparing some figures about Facebook users growth by Country, and compared the last two weeks of June (before G+ was launched) with the first two weeks of July (when G+ was launched).

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Interesting enough, in the past two weeks, while Google got 10 million new registered users since its launch, Facebook’s new users grew less than the previous 2 weeks. As shown in the picture above (SocialNetConomy, 2011), out of the 213 Countries where Facebook is present, new users registrations declined by some 3.4 million during the past two weeks.

Which Countries got the biggest decline?

The figure below represents the top 20 countries in Facebook (those with the majority of users, regardless of the Internet penetration in that Country). Top 20 countries decline, in terms of new Facebook registrations as a total, is slightly over 2 million.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Some countries slowed down more than others – and there is some confirmation in the recently launchedunofficial Google+ statistics website.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Data show a vast majority of countries experienced a slowdown – between 0.2 % and 1.3% of their overall Facebook users base for the top 20 countries. The table shows the difference between the number of new users registered in the June 15-June 30 (2011) timeframe, minus the number of new Facebook users registered in the the past two weeks (July 1- 15, 2011, after G+ launched).

The table shows the top 10 “declining countries” (additional data are available on request).

Suggestions to marketers investing on Facebook:

We are still at the beginning of G+ vs Facebook, but surely something more to consider on the marketers’ plate is how to keep people engaged on the platform they invested on. This could also be a good reason for Facebook to get closer to those brands whose pages may be keeping their fans on Facebook and that may keep Facebook growing. It could be a win-win if thhey manage to get closer to each other and become more “social”.

Facebook to announce something “awesome” next week – is it really about Skype?

As you will recall, at the beginning of last week, while Google was creating the buzz around its forthcoming Google+, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was going to announce something awesome next week.

Mashable, one of the most followed news portals around new tech and social media, yesterday announced the “awesome” news was about the integration of the Skype Video chat with Facebook. While surely this would definitely be a good improvement for Facebook, I don’t see it being that “awesome”. So I decided to investigate a bit further.

This is why I believe it may not be just that:

Facebook and Microsoft started a long-lasting relationship back in August 2006, when they signed an exclusive agreement which made Microsoft the exclusive advertising platform for Facebook. This deal was worth 900M$  and it was for 3 years. In 2007 Facebook and Microsoft Corp. announced that the two companies were expanding their advertising partnership till 2011 and that Microsoft was taking a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation.

In 2008 Facebook implemented Microsoft’s Live search in its pages and in 2009 the two companies announced a further integration with Bing. While Facebook was integrating search with social network, Google launched its first OS: Chrome (2008). In 2009 Facebook purchased FriendFeed, somehow similar to twitter, but not as “followed” as the original.

Big things happened in 2010.

Bing search service started to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of Facebook’s (recently introduced) Like buttons, and Microsoft signed a partnership with Bing, and then added Facebook into Outlook. [Question to self: will Google use anonimized data for our searches while we are logged in on G+?]

In the meantime, some other partnerships didn’t go through: Apple and Facebook didn’t find any agreement for Ping, Apple’s music-social-network on iTunes, and Microsoft and Twitter didn’t partner on Bing (Twitter recently announced an agreement with Yahoo Japan). Apple made it to Twitter though, and the next iOS will have Twitter already integrated. And still during these times, Google had again social network troubles, with Buzz (its first attempt was Orkut, only successful in Brazil).

2011, so far, seems an year of surprises, or at least the year of the truth:

-          Facebook hires: starting with Orkut’s business development person, and going to Microsoft’s global ad sales head Carolyn Everson – which was about to turn into a possible legal action, till the most recent hacker who jailbroke the iPhone and PS3 seem actually going to mark another milestone in the Facebook story. Facebook also buys some software companies, such as Sofa.

-          Microsoft buys Skype for 8.5B$. Definitely a big thing for Facebook, after the integration with Live Messenger, definitely Skype would have been the next one. So not really awesome I would say- at least not such a surprise, we all knew it was coming. It would be awesome if we could share videos in real time – a true real live feed and video, from our mobile – which is the most used way to upload pictures on Facebook- made possible through the integration of Skype and Facebook. This would also make sense if we keep in mind the Seattle-based team who developed this “awesome” thing is definitely focused on mobile-related technologies and applications.

(Click to enlarge- this has been adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/michperu/3702942040/ )

-    In the meantime, Google launches updated profiles in February and then more recently Google +, integrating and enhancing its previous unsuccessful social attempts and its successful apps, and tapping into common users for gathering feedback, while creating great expectations by limiting the access to a few users only.  [I’m one of the lucky ones- see my preliminary thoughts here]

So now, what shall we expect as forthcoming awesome announcements? Surely the Skype one is a big thing, but let’s try and think about what we could really call awesome (and surprising):

-          Not sure you noticed, but LinkedIn is looking more and more like Facebook. I just noticed in the past couple of days how comments on LinkedIn and Facebook look so incredibly similar in terms of shape, colors and available links (Like-Comment-Share). And not sure you noticed, while Facebook was testing quietly its own LinkedIn app (BranchOut) since a while using LinkedIn API with no issues, as soon as Monster announced its own Facebook app (BeKnown) quite loudly, LinkedIn closed its API quickly – to both apps. What if the “awesome” announcement was an integration of Facebook and LinkedIn? After all, they are the two big ones in the social space.

-    Another big thing could be a “Triangle”, with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all together.

I would definitely call awesome an announcement about Facebook being implemented into the next iPhone5. After all, each of them has a good reason for competing with Google this hard battle -and a triangle, on a funny note, would be the perfect opponent to Circles ;-)

  • Google’s Chrome OS didn’t make Microsoft its best friend
  • Google’s Android apps are Apple’s apps biggest enemy
  • Google’s “Plus” social network now seems a much serious obstacle to Facebook’s growth

While waiting for the announcement to become official and for the next big things coming to our browsers and our phones, it’s good to consider that all that happened during these past 4 years of strategic partnership between Facebook and Microsoft, and all that Google and Apple made during these past 4 years,  are depicting an interesting scenario for a number of markets, not only the social networks one:

-    the advertising market – think about how Facebook has changed it and how Google+ can add our personal habits to all already know information about our searches, all company websites traffic and all other G-apps that we use every day- and don’t forget about related implications on all those sectors who are increasingly “socializing” their marketing strategies. A lot has been said about Facebook and privacy: shall we worry about Google and privacy? Google may know too much about us: our circles, how we influence them, what we look for, how we purchase, where we click, how our websites are performing and what are our Internet habits, other than our life habits, what are the files we share for work and for fun, what we like to play and what we want to read. Think about applying advertising to Sparks and to Circles we influence. G+ may be 1984.

-          the mobile phones market – once upon a time there was RIM’s Blackberry, whose aim was to increase workers’ productivity, and today the mobile war is moving to Apple’s OS and Android, with Microsoft gaining shares, with less focus on productivity and more on internet traffic (on social networks… somehow killing productivity). Don’t forget about mobile carriers and their increased revenues coming from data. Here the battle is more interesting between Google and Apple.

-    the OS market, with Google launching its Chrome OS in 2008 and openly declaring war to Microsoft (and Apple)

-    the app development and gaming market – just think about Facebook’s revenues with Zynga and about the recent announcement that Google+ will soon launch games on its platform, not to mention Microsoft’s Live meeting gaming platform. Did you know people on Facebook install 20 million applications every day?

-    the social networks market – just think about MySpace. Or just about Facebook’s revenues. Then add Google and Apple’s Ping. And don’t forget about LinkedIn and Twitter.

-    the cloud: Google did not invent it, but definitely contributed to make it become one of the biggest thing under the spotlight. Apple recently spoke about the iCloud. Microsoft’s Office 365 is there too.

Whatever it will be, we will surely be impacted. Not sure about you, but I am happy I am here witnessing these happenings.

These are my thoughts. What’s your take?