Mar 31, 2012
Sign Up for My Newsletter
-
Author Archive
Live Streaming Schedule (NYC Time)
Monday, April 2, 2012
9:00 AM – Caryn Marooney, vice president of technology communications, Facebook
PRSA has asked me NOT to stream any sessions. But others at the conference are, so watch my twitter feed and I’ll retweet their links. Sorry.
Categories: Uncategorized0 CommentsMar 08, 2012
I’ve updated my sample social media policy as a result of this conversation with Lisa Milam-Perez, who edits a blog by CCH Wolters Kluwer about US law and business practices, and who recently published a post about the latest social media guidance from the National Labor Relations Board, which says organizations need to be more specific in the language they use to govern the use of social media policy for US-based employees.Under the National Labor Relations Act, US-based employees have a legal right to organize to improve their working conditions, even if that effort includes publicly criticizing their employer or discussing confidential information, such as a salaries, on social networks. That’s right, restricting employees from discussing “confidential information” is too broad a requirement to pass muster.In this podcast, Lisa discusses two memoranda that were recently released by the NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon. The first one (OM 11-74) on August 18, 2011, profiles the NLRB’s resolution of 14 social media cases; a second memo (OM-12-31) on January 25, outlines more recent cases reviewed by his office.As Lisa says in her blog post:“An employer’s policies “should not be so sweeping that they prohibit the kinds of activity protected by federal labor law, such as the discussion of wages or working conditions among employees,” according to Solomon. Distilled to its essence: standard labor law principles apply here. That means that even if it does not expressly bar NLRA-protected activity, the NLRB would still find fault with a policy that:- “chills” employees from exercising their protected Section 7 rights;
- significantly burdens an employee’s exercise of those rights;
- was enacted in direct response to union activity; or
- is applied in such a manner that it restricts the exercise of protected rights.”
If you haven’t updated you social media policy in a while and you need enforceable employee guidelines, now is the time. As I mentioned earlier, I’m in the process of updating my social media policy template so sign up for my email newsletter (upper right-column of this page) if you’d like a notification when it’s available.Categories: UncategorizedJan 23, 2012
The business model known as collaborative consumption — where buyers and sellers trade without intermediaries through an online community marketplaces — has been a homerun for Ebay and Craigslist.But a new breed of start-ups like AirBNB, which apply the same model to service industies, where responses times are critical, and relationships matter, may not fare so well.
Here are three examples where service oriented community network business models fall short:
1. When Buyers Need Protection – The more important relationships are to successful transactions, the more risky peer-to-peer transactions are. When there is very little promise of future revenues, sellers are much less motivated to perform. If I chose to purchase raw materials from a vendor based soley on price, and the quality is inferior or they can’t deliver on schedule, that could shut my plant down. And time is money, so I need a relationship with someone who can fix problems quickly. And the same is true in most service industries, which is why they may ultimately fail at collaborative consumption. Take AirBNB for example. Their listing hosts can evict guests without cause, and there’s virtually nothing meaningful the service can do about it. On the other hand, if guests back out of a booking, they could wind forfeiting half the booking fee.
2. When Buyers Need Support - Recurring revenue is what motivates sellers to remedy problems. In the case of a community networks like AirBNB, where the likelihood of repeat business between the same buyer and seller is much lower than it would be for a hotel chain, motivating the seller with the threat of a bad review is defeated by the seller’s ability to slam the buyer with an equally bad rating. And AirBNB does not serve as an arbiter of truth. Given the size of the network and the number of transactions, how could they? Service oriented collaborative consumption business models don’t scale well.
3. When Response Times are Critical – If you’re unhappy with a purchase on Ebay, you can file a dispute on your own time, from the comfort of your home. But if you’re locked out of an apartment you rented from AirBNB, your ride doesn’t show or your task doesn’t get done, you could be looking at 5 hours in dark hallway, a missed flight or no dry cleaning. Mishaps are often nobody’s fault. But when they happen, they do need to be resolved, and that’s what service industries are about. Connecting buyers and sellers to trade services without protecting either side with adequate support is critical. But the expense of providing that support for a community network just may not be scalable for these nascent companies. Adding standards and verification could be the answer. The question is can these companies afford it without sacrificing their profitability?
Social media business models are not one-size fits all. Just because collaborative consumption works for some online marketplaces does not mean it works for all, and services may be too economically challenging for these start-ups to delivery.
The jury is out on whether or not service oriented collaborative consumption businesses like AirBNB, Uber and TaskRabbit will be able to adequately satisfy those customers in an environment where response times and relationships are important.
This post is based on an experience I had renting an apartment through AirBNB. If you’d like to hear a podcast discussion about what happened, click here.
Categories: collaborative consumption
With all the talk about the complaint PhoneDog.com filed against Noah Kravitz for “misappropriation of trade secrets and damaged the company’s business, goodwill, and reputation” some companies are liable to update their social media policy.
But those that do are making a mistake. Because if they’re going to be heard through social media, they’re going to need as much help as they can get. And they’re not going to get it by imposing ownership claims over their personal social media accounts
I don’t intend to make any substantial changes to my Social Media Policy Template because of it, and here’s why:
On social networks, crowds direct our attention. If it trends, it upends. And if it doesn’t, it just ends.
What one person tweets matters only a little. What the crowd retweets, matters most. The same social gravity applies on Facebook, Linkedin and G+. An effective corporate social media policy protects the organization and its employees alike. Afterall, why would your employees retweet your message on their personal social networking account if they’re concerned it might get them fired, or if they’re concerned you might someday try and take it away from them?
Imposing strict ownership requirements over an employee’s personal social media account discourages them from using social media for on theior employers behlaf, which means they won’t be retweeting your message. And in nowadays, you need retweets, Likes and +1s to get noticed. So a good social media policy must encourage employee participation.
Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, who is paraphrased in a story about the incident by New York Times reporter John Biggs (@JohnBiggs) says it best:
…many industries had policies that required sales staff to leave their Rolodexes behind, but that these policies were as relevant to social media as Rolodexes are to the modern office. After all, social media accounts are, almost by definition, personal.
He also said that the average Twitter account had less clout than many might think.
On social networks, we crowd source news and information. If companies want to get noticed, they’ve got to get crowds talking. And in most cases, their employees are going to be easiest place to start.
Do you intend to update your social media policy as a result of this complaint, or will you wait to see what legal precedent, if any, transpires?
Image By: Dbarefoot
Categories: social media policy, social networks
Dec 17, 2011
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how best to conduct social media training online. I do a lot of live training, which consists of lectures and exercises, and I see first-hand how tough it is for anyone to take in reams of information in real time.
Lectures are inhumane. You sit with a bunch of people you don’t know and hear one person share basic concepts. You can ask only one or two questions. There’s not much time for instructor-student dialogue. Everyone’s forced to learn at the same pace. And students are not empowered to apply what they’ve learned.
Tests don’t accurately assess ayour capabilities. GPAs, transcripts or completion certificates say nothing about whether or not you really have the skills that were taught. Yet testing is the main way you’re evaluated, even though projects work is a much more realisitic simulation of how you apply practical skills to real world situations.
With exception of the big name Ivy League schools, academic credentials are certainly no guarantee of employment. Attending college affords you a valuable life experience, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get real skills and be able tp earn a living.
Technology has the potential to change all that, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and Stanford AI professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun discussed in a recent Google+ Hangout about the future of technology in education.
The video, in which students from well known universities ask the three questions about how technology will change education, lasts about 45 minutes, which is not exactly the granular chunks Sal says students need, but if this subject interests you, it is well worth watching.
Here are the major take aways:
- Gamification makes learning more Fun: Scores are more fun and more motivational when they’re presented in a competitive, game-like fashion. What is a report card other than a score? Some people think of their bank account as a score. Why not use game mechanics to encourage participation and improve performance?
- When people are together physically, they learn more through one-on-one mentoring and group interaction than from a passive lectures. Use technology to convey basic principles in granular chunks that students can stop, rewind and replay, and make class time a more human experience through more instructor/student/peer interactions.
- The challenge of integrating technology into education is combining personal and group experiences, where the personal experience is the student’s interactions with the course material, and the group experiece is the student’s interactions with their instructor and peers.
- Educators can use technology to collect more detailed data on student performance, much like Google Analytics collects detailed data on website usage. Grades are too broad a measure of performance to have real value to employers. Online learning allows instructors to use A/B testing to see what students respond best to and improve their courseware, and to capture performance data as well. But more importantly, using the web for personal learning could also let students focus on project work that can form the basis of a portfolio, a more meaningful way for employers to evaluate them as job candidates.
- Just cause something’s recorded, doesn’t mean it has to be perfect. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Use online video to explain things, and break those explanations down in bite sized chucks.
- Everybody has something to teach. Crowd sourcing knowledge online has real value. The challenge is enforcing standards. We may find that crowd-sourcing combined with content curation is the answer.
The other big challenge, as I see it, is getting students to actually watch the content, particularly in today’s online environme with so many distractions. Sal says the relationship between the on-demand content and in class content is the key and suggests wrapping projects and in class discussions around the on-demand content.
Still, I think it might be tough to get someone who is disengaged due to personal or family issues to find the uninterrupted time, which in-class sessions guarantee, to consume the on-demand content. But that’s another issue entirely.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the Hangout. Thank you Sal, Peter and Sebastion for taking the time to make the video. It definitely helps me sort out my thinking on how best to use technology to conduct social media training.
Categories: elearning, gamification