CMS Weekly

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

“Perfect storm” brewing within the workforce
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

Social media expert Tod Maffin says companies are about to face a mass exodus of employees due to a kind of perfect storm brewing within two key generations of employees. Baby Boomers set to retire en masse, companies are going to have to find ways to replace them with younger employees,- “But that particular crop of employees – the ‘Facebook Generation’ – is as likely to walk out the back door as easily as they came in the front.”

Maffin says these twenty-something employees present an entirely new set of challenges for employers – and that companies need to take an entirely new approach to managing their needs and retaining their services. Two of the recommendations in the article:

Give Them Your Trust: Young people born between 1980 and 1990 were raised by Generation X parents who gave them unprecedented levels of trust. Misguided attempts at increasing productivity, like blocking Facebook and instant-messenger programs, scream “We don’t trust you!” to this group of workers (it’s like blocking telephone calls).

Focus on Team-Based Solutions: That’s the way they were taught all through school – it was all about group projects, not individual reports. Engage them in group projects and let them play an active role in that process.

Consider giving them a box of their own personalized business cards on day one.

Invest in Technology: Your technology must at least keep pace with what this generation uses at home.

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Social Media Policies from 80+ Organizations
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

One of the key challenges for modern organizations is to define a social media policy.

Mashable has been a major resource here, with articles such as 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy and Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing. If you’re looking to define your own social media guidelines, however, one worthwhile task is to read the policies of other organizations.

Chris Boudreaux, author of the upcoming book “Social Media Governance” has assembled 82 such policies on the book’s website Socialmediagovernance.com. From companies to charities to military organizations, it’s a treasure trove for those struggling with social media guidelines.

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Create Public or Private Forums with Zoho Discussions
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-28

Continuing on the topic of social media tools, Zoho has just announced Zoho Discussions, a new social tool in their ever-growing productivity suite. While new to the public, Zoho has been using the tool internally already, so it’s strength in managing hundreds of active discussions daily has been proven. Zoho has taken on Microsoft Office and Google Docs with its productivity platform, and has been quite prolific in application releases.

Some examples are:

Zoho Creator 3.0 – for data driven applications

Zoho Marketplace – online community and marketplace for Zoho Creator Apps

Zoho Creator Partner Program

More than 100,000 applications have been created, but it’s still to be determined if the Zoho line is going to be able to stay in the game with the heavy weights Google and Microsoft in serving the small and mid-size business market. They are certainly throwing some attractive features into the mix, particularly for smaller clients. And Zoho Discussions allows businesses to remain in control of their brand and the user experience they provide to customers through custom URLs, branding options and elements, customizable look and feel, even including full rebranding (white labeling) options.

# Rich User Experience: Zoho Discussions, features:
Topic Administration where community moderators and users can manage the topics.
Integrated advanced search, RSS, and SEO for content discoverability.
Branding control for businesses.
Rich User Experience including WYSIWYG editor, threaded conversations, drafts and previews.
Administration features promising less administrator work while supporting more users.

Check out the Zoho Discussions video on cmswire.com.

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Thinking About Using Facebook as Your Company Web Page? Think Again
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-28

From Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Blog, some opinions on using social media instead of a traditional website for your business. Attractive option, particularly for really small businesses – and it is easy to get swept up into all the excitement. There’s a place for Facebook and Twitter in your marketing toolkit, but don’t make it the only tool.

Here are some of the reasons:

1. Control – You can maintain control of your own website built from scratch or with a CMS tool. And you should maintain this control. Don’t leave your important business presence to the mercy of a company like Facebook. Their rules state that accounts are only to be used to represent individuals, and they can wipe out your presence if you violate that rule.

2. Creativity limitations – There are limits to what you can do inside existing social media tools. And there’s a risk that they could also make across the board changes that would impact your business.

3. Search limitations – a custom web site is simply better for bringing in new customers

Ideas to consider instead:

1. Create your web page on a custom domain and add a blog to your site. Link these to your Facebook or Twitter pages.

2. Create a Fan Page under Facebook, where users can post pictures, comments, discussions, etc.

Don’t ignore the social media – used correctly as part of a comprehensive marketing plan it will help you understand your customers better. Find out more about inbound marketing at InboundMarketing.com.

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Google Wave: Is it the latest “gotta have it” gizmo for your cutting edge website?
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool announced by Google at the 2009 Google I/O conference. It is a web-based service designed to merge e-mail, IM, wiki and social networking, boasting automated translation between 40 languages, as well as robust spell/grammar check and numerous extensions.

And you can extend it even further with the Google Wave APIs. Go to wave.google.com for a developer preview. Also, be sure to check out ninjaforge.com for Ninja Wave, a Joomla! extension for embedding Google Wave on your Joomla! website.

Ninja Forge is a subscription based Joomla! extension web site. They call themselves the “first and premier Open Source Extension Club”, providing cutting edge quality, trust, support, freedom and technology. Stian Didriksen is a 19-year-old developer, busy pushing the envelope – you may want to follow at @stipsan at his site, ninjaforge.com.

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The Productivity Myth: Step Away From the Twitter, Get Back to Work
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

Employers it seems are very worried about lost productivity due to social media usage. The fact is that there are already tons of other outside distractions at work ranging from instant message, email, workplace socializing and the never ending cigarette break – so this is not a new problem – but an old concern applied to a new technology; similar to what we see when the ranks of psychologists hit the TV news circuit to describe some new addiction caused by technology.

During the same time that Facebook grew from 100 million users to 200 million and Twitter went Oprah, U.S business sector productivity has increased 2.0 percent. This is a bit off the recent historic rate 2.5% – but I don’t think anyone during this recession is blaming that on Twitter.

Companies that think they may have a productivity problem because of social networks and the like actually have a measurement problem – that is – they don’t know how to objectively measure whether an employee is meeting standards of productivity. In the absence of clear measurement – they resort to punitive actions (blocking these sites, monitoring employee behavior) that can damage morale and trust.

If your sales team is nailing their numbers do you care if they are on Facebook? If your call center is handling volume with great customer satisfaction – do you care if they use Twitter?

Lastly, most companies don’t recognize that they often expect employees to check email after hours and bring work home when needed. If this is the expectation then blocking employees from accessing these social sites during “work hours” is not a fair bargain.

My recommendation for companies is to clarify job performance criteria and establish clear guidelines on how to productively engage social media (social media savvy employees are an asset not a liability)… and to build those guidelines collaboratively with their employees using these very same technologies. My favorite guideline comes from IBM (they have the best guidelines that I know of) which says, “Don’t forget your day job”. Enough said.

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