15. Corporate Governance, Strategy, and Implementation
We’ve covered a lot of ground thus far in terms of how to use the social Web on a product or brand level. But if you’re a larger company with multiple departments, and especially if you’re in a highly regulated industry, it’s critical to address corporate governance and implementation across your organization. This chapter discusses the three aspects of corporate governance for social media: culture, policy, and tools.
Social Media Culture
As anyone who has tried introducing new technologies to an organization knows, tools and tactics are easy. Getting people to believe and adopt is hard. It requires organizations to change their culture, and where there is change, there will almost always be resistance.
It is doubly challenging when an organization tries to adopt Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn more generally because these sites are all about openness, transparency, and individual empowerment, which is not always aligned with enterprise culture. Yet a more open culture is needed for social initiatives to take root in the first place and to succeed, and the customer voice exposed by social media also forces organizations to change and become more open. The following sections provide a few examples and tips on what it takes to influence company culture to support corporate social initiatives.
Getting an Executive Sponsor
Most social initiatives start bottom-up by an individual or group of individuals who interface with customers or are familiar with Facebook and Twitter from their personal lives. But for these initiatives to succeed, they need to be blessed at the highest levels. Executives need to be aware of these initiatives—and, ideally, involved in and contributing to them—to set the right culture, signal support, and allocate resources.
In fact, the leaders of some of the most innovative organizations in recent years have also been some of the earliest adopters of Twitter and Facebook, including Warren Buffet, Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com), John Stumpf (Group EVP of Community Banking at Wells Fargo), and U. S. President Barack Obama.
Executives who embrace social media are also evolving their leadership style to become more open. Consider some thoughts from Charlene Li on some of the benefits of giving up control.
The Benefits of Giving Up Control
Charlene Li
The annals of business literature proclaim the wisdom of flat organizations and hierarchies. But if you look at the organizational charts of most companies, you’ll see one person at the top and multiple layers. This isn’t an org chart; it’s a control chart. The reality is, most people want and need to be in control, because that’s the only way they can be sure things will get done.
I believe that leaders need to learn how to give up control while still being in command. It seems like a contradiction, but let’s take a closer look at what leaders actually do. Ultimately, they need to inspire people to band together and accomplish a specific goal. Giving up control can be a very effective way to reach that goal. That’s because being open, in terms of information sharing and decision making, has very real benefits, including these:
• Removing friction—Moving information up and down a hierarchy is inefficient and, in some cases, becomes such a barrier that people just don’t bother. Collaboration and social technologies make it much easier to share information, thus removing much of the friction. Want to know who the internal experts are on behavioral targeting? Do a search to see who has written a post or worked on a project in this area. Removing barriers to information and people improves access to information and lowers the time and cost of getting things done.
• Scaling efforts—Instead of having just one person focused on a problem, what if you could have your entire department working to solve the problem? Or even your entire employee base providing customer service? Best Buy enables any of its employees to answer customer questions at www.twitter.com/twelpforce; to date, more than 2,200 employees have signed up to do exactly that. So if you’re worried about the time and resources needed to engage in social media, turn to your customers and employees to scale for you—of course, this can happen only if you’re willing to give up control.
• Enabling fast response—If something happens on the front lines, who’s empowered to fix it? At the State Bank of India, Chairman Om Bhatt transformed the culture of its 200,000 local banks so that customer service problems were addressed by the people best able to solve them:the bank window teller. Instead of having to wait for information to go up and a decision to come back down a hierarchy, bank branch employees were given the training—and, more important, the permission—to make decisions at their discretion. The result was a marked improvement in customer service marks.
• Gaining commitment—Something amazing happens when you give people power:They commit themselves, heart and soul. When customers realize that they can tell a company what they really think about a product and know that the company will take it to heart, many will provide detailed ideas on what they would like to see improved. Employees who understand the responsibility that comes with power begin to act like owners, taking the small actions that cumulatively can move markets.
Giving up control isn’t easy or natural, but if you can understand the benefits that come with it, you’ll be on your way to putting in place the guidelines, parameters, and training that act as the guardrails to keep people pointed and pulling in the same direction.
Charlene Li (@charleneli) is the founding partner of Altimeter Group, author of Open Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), and co-author of Groundswell (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
Creating a Cross-Functional Social Media Council
Often social networking projects fail because of competing functional agendas, organizational politics, or some compliance issue that was overlooked because legal or IT never had a chance to weigh in. Companies such as DeVry and Prudential have successfully achieved collaborative buy-in across the organization by creating a cross-functional social media council or task force. Some of the council’s responsibilities include these:
• Creating and communicating a simple set of social media guidelines for employees on appropriate use and conduct on social networking sites.
• Reviewing and auditing social media assets at least quarterly so that the appropriate action can be taken if, say, someone creates a Facebook Page for the company but stops posting to it on a regular basis (it essentially becomes a dead asset).
• Developing a succession plan for Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages when the employees who created them move on to a different job within the company or to a new employer.
• Establishing a process for handing off certain customer requests or complaints that appear on social networking sites to the appropriate internal departments and closing the loop with the customer. (Most companies are doing this via email today. If you want to get fancy, you can try to integrate Twitter with a CRM system.)
• Making sure all the disparate social media initiatives link back to one another when and where appropriate. For instance, a Facebook Page can “favorite” other Facebook Pages and, of course, Twitter accounts can follow other Twitter accounts. Pepsi has its main Facebook favorite the Facebook Pages of its subbrands, affiliates, and spokespeople, including Pepsi Canada, Gatorade, and athlete Clint Dempsey.
• Determining what aspects of Facebook or Twitter to in-house versus outsource to an agency.
• Standardizing on tools and negotiating a company-wide license or discount.
Having everyone who wants to be involved on board increases the chances that functional agendas can give way to the customer agenda. Social media can be one of those high-profile, high-stakes, high-reward initiatives, so it’s better to have everyone win together and learn together.
At the same time, you don’t want to create more bureaucracy and hinder creativity within your organizations. A few best practices for social media councils are to limit the time and duration of meetings to only what’s absolutely necessary and to limit the number of individuals from each department. (In most cases, one representative is sufficient.)
Partnering with IT, Legal, and Compliance
Make sure you include representatives from IT, legal, and compliance on your cross-functional council. The challenge is that these departments are, by design, typically averse to change. From their perspective, social media is scary because it exposes your organization to new technology, legal, and compliance risk—and if something goes wrong, they’re on the hook.
Yet business environments change quickly, and it’s important for those teams in your company to recognize that those risks are already at play because your customers and employees are on Facebook and Twitter talking about your company. The most important thing you can do is get buy-in from top-level executives around your social initiatives and ask them to help rally IT, legal, and compliance resources and support around business objectives. People managing the social accounts need to spend time understanding and staying up-to-date with the terms of service on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and anywhere else the company has a presence. Together you will best be able to identify the risks that are the greatest threat to your business and come up with the set of policies and plan to mitigate them.
Communicating Business Value
Another challenge for social media is how to make and keep it a priority. Ultimately, this hinges on your ability to tie your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter efforts back to important business objectives (as we talked about in Chapter 10, “How To: Build and Manage Relationships on the Social Web”) and be able to measure the value in dollars, NetPromoter score, renewal rate, or whatever you are optimizing for.
As with your company’s other marketing initiatives, this is where reports and dashboards come in handy to provide qualitative and quantitative results justifying your social media investment (see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1
Analytics and reporting such as this one from Hearsay Labs help visually and clearly communicate the business value of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn initiatives.
Educating and Inspiring
People are often most afraid of what is unknown, so training and educating your employees on not only the value of the social Web but also how to achieve their personal and department goals using social tools will reduce the amount of resistance to change. Companies such as Zappos, Coldwell Banker, and the State of Utah now incorporate Twitter and Facebook training as part of new-hire orientation, as well as provide ongoing tutorials and support for employees. Other companies have encouraged “reverse mentor-ship” on social media topics, with Gen-Y hires helping teach older employees the ins and outs of Facebook. Many employees and executives also just ask their teenage sons and daughters or nieces and nephews for help.
A number of popular conferences that provide an immersive experience for key employees to quickly learn and absorb best practices to bring back to the company, including Web 2.0 Expo and the Social Networking Conference. (Register at www.socialnetworkingconference.com/clarashih.php to get $75 off.) If you have a large number of employees or company-confidential information and scenarios to discuss, it may be more cost-effective to host your own mini-conference to facilitate companywide learning and support for social Web projects.
Hiring the Right People
Companies are also hiring for social media savvy. Bring in new employees who tweet and use Facebook on a regular basis, and they will help spread social media knowledge and culture. Just as you’d think twice about hiring someone who doesn’t know how to use email, basic social media skills are becoming an important job skill to seek or train for.
Social Media Policy and Processes
To help create and support a corporate culture that accepts social media, it helps to have clear guidelines and processes in place to steer individuals and departments in the right direction. The point of introducing policy isn’t to stifle innovative grassroots efforts, but rather to align the organization’s goals and ensure compliance with company brand-level objectives and industry regulation. The first step is to identify key risks for your organization, and then to craft a social media policy that addresses those risks.
Identifying Key Risk Areas
Enterprise social networking requires a certain degree of openness to work and to succeed, but this introduces new risks around privacy and security, intellectual property, and misrepresentation by employees. An important first step in instituting proper corporate governance is to honestly assess where the key risks might be. At the end of the day, it is more important to be aware of and manage risk than try to avoid risk altogether because that is costly, frustrating, and impossible. The optimal level of risk is not zero; it’s just something you need to acknowledge, mitigate, and manage.
• Privacy and security—The biggest security risks around enterprise social networking are generally not related to technology. They involve identity and privacy. A wealth of personal information about individuals is available on social networking sites. To establish their identity and build rapport with their friend connections, people are very forthcoming with personal data such as date of birth, education, employment history, and the like. But especially without the right privacy settings in place, members of online social networking sites could become easy targets for identity theft. Seemingly harmless pieces of information such as your hometown or your pet’s name are often the same kinds of security questions that other sites, such as banking sites, use to verify your identity.
• Intellectual property and confidentiality—The second big risk area for businesses is safeguarding intellectual property and confidentiality against competitive or malicious threats. Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn remove a lot of barriers to interacting with customers and others in the community-at-large for productive activities such as marketing, sales, product innovation, and recruiting, but they also expose your business to the risk that data will be shared with the wrong people.
• Data ownership—An important issue to keep in mind is ownership of data and content related to your brand generated on Twitter or Facebook Pages. At least in the Facebook terms of service, Facebook owns this data. Facebook has always maintained open access to this data for brands and Page owners, but from a legal perspective, it’s important to recognize this technicality. For this reason, any content or information that requires clear ownership and confidentiality that you do choose to publish to social networking sites should appear via a platform application that you commission for this purpose rather than through the out-of-the-box mechanisms the site provides. (Popular custom application developers include Context Optional and Buddy Media.)
• Employee productivity—One risk of encouraging Facebook is that your employees waste all their time on nonbusiness-related activities such as socializing with friends, uploading pictures, and playing Farmville or Mafia Wars. Businesses can mitigate this risk by restricting access to certain parts of Facebook from the company network or by developing and communicating clear social media guidelines for employees, as we discuss shortly.
• Brand misrepresentation—Last, but not least, the openness of social media may increase the opportunities for your employees to speak out of turn and potentially misrepresent your brand to customers, partners, and the public-at-large, either purposefully or inadvertently. For the former, you could imagine, for example, that a disgruntled former employee who was fired might attempt to retaliate by saying negative things about your company on public forums in Facebook. For the latter, a common example involves employees who carelessly or unknowingly post inappropriate public photos on their Facebook profile, which then reflects badly on your company. As we discuss in the next section, it’s very important to develop a social media policy and make sure that employees and others receive the proper training before they are allowed to participate.
Table 15.1 calls out the top issues to consider before you embark on corporate social initiatives.
Crafting a Social Media Policy
If your business is like most, company policy should be in place governing offline activities and likely online activities such as sending email, instant messaging, and surfing the Web. Companies should also develop policies governing suggested and permissible use of social networking technologies by employees, specifically to mitigate the risks identified.
Certain things you don’t ever want employees to say (such as profanity), and it’s good to communicate a clear stance on those. This also helps your employees internalize the policy if you can talk about the implications of their participation and include real-world examples of when employee use of social media has gone wrong, such as in the Domino’s Pizza video on YouTube that we mentioned in Chapter 5, “Customer Service in the Facebook Era.” A lot of what ends up in your social media policy may feel like common sense, but formalizing it in writing is often a good wakeup call for employees to “think before they tweet.” It also provides grounds for termination or other disciplinary action if employees do abuse social media privileges.
Beyond communicating clearly unacceptable use, it’s a good idea to offer guidance rather than requirements, allow for flexibility, and encourage employees’ creativity and unique personalities to come across, within limits. Otherwise, if your PR team is scripting every tweet, what’s the point of letting employees participate in the first place?
Every company might end up with a different social media policy that reflects its unique culture and business, but it can be helpful to use other organizations’ social media policy or guidelines as a starting point. Your organization might want to incorporate a few common elements into its social media policy:
• Communicate trust and goals—Acknowledge that the company is entrusting its employees with its brand, trade secrets, and legal compliance. In turn, the company expects employees to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social technologies in responsible and productive ways that contribute to the goals of the company.
• Provide helpful reminders and suggestions—Remind employees that they are representing your brand in their posts and responses. You might want to suggest which kinds of content to post, which content to respond to, and which issues to defer to a different department to resolve, such as a customer service team.
• Establish rules for moderating public discussion—Part of your social media guidelines should also include your organization’s outward-facing policy, including when it is acceptable for employees to delete a post (for example, if it contains profanity, contains messages of hate, or is otherwise irrelevant to the purpose of the Facebook Page or online community). Communicate this both to the public on your Web site or Facebook Page and to employees so that they know how and when to moderate.
• Clearly articulate compliance requirements—If you are in a regulated industry, such as financial services, certain statements and personal information cannot be discussed on a public forum such as Facebook or Twitter. Make sure your employees are aware that these blacklisted conversations apply also to social media, and consider using a tool that helps monitor and flag any situations in which these requirements may have been compromised. Don’t give your employees legalese—try to explain it in clear and simple terms.
• Limit use to business-related activities—Especially if you have nonsalaried workers being paid by the hour, it might be a good idea to clearly articulate that the time they are at work needs to be focused on business-related activities (both online and offline). If it’s a serious problem for your organization, you might want to consider getting IT involved to block certain URLs (such as to any Facebook games).
• Develop a transition plan—Employees and even entire teams or departments can come and go. It’s important to create a transition plan to ensure seamless and continued ownership for assets such as Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.
The State of Utah’s Department of Technology Services has done an excellent job incorporating many of these elements in formulating a social media policy for state employees. The state’s chief technology officer, Dave Fletcher, realized that Facebook and Twitter are valuable channels for state agencies to reach, engage, and provide information for residents. Here is an excerpt from its policy. (The full version can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/utahsocialguide.)
State of Utah Social Media Guidelines (Excerpt)
The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines for use of social media at the State of Utah. Agencies may utilize these guidelines as a component of agency policy development for sanctioned participation using Social Media services, or simply as employee guidelines. If you are a State employee or contractor creating or contributing to blogs, microblogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, or any other kind of social media both on and off the utah.gov domain, these guidelines are applicable. The State expects all who participate in social media on behalf of the State, to understand and to follow these guidelines. These guidelines will evolve as new technologies and social networking tools emerge.
Engagement
• Emerging platforms for online collaboration are changing the way we work, and offer new ways to engage with customers, colleagues, and the world at large. It is a new model for interaction and social computing that can help employees to build stronger, more successful citizen and agency business relationships. It is a way for State employees to take part in national and global conversations related to the work we are doing at the State.
• If you participate in social media, follow these guiding principles:
• Ensure that your agency sanctions official participation and representation on social media sites.
• Stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what is going on at the State, and in other larger contexts.
• Post meaningful, respectful comments, no spam, and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
• Pause and think before posting. Reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate.
• Respect proprietary information, content, and confidentiality.
• When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it appropriate and polite.
• Ensure that your participation is consistent with the provisions of Utah Administrative Rule R477-9. Employee Conduct.
• Participation must comply with the posted Privacy Policy of the State.
• Know and follow the State’s Acceptable Use Policy, Information Protection 5000-1700, and Confidential Information 5000-1701 policies.
• Use social media collaboration tools explicitly authorized in the State’s Internet based Collaboration Tool Standard 4300-0012.
• Follow applicable agency social media policies.
• Transparency—Your honesty will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at the State, use your real name, identify that you work for the State of Utah, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.
• Judicious—Make sure your efforts to be transparent do not violate the State’s privacy, confidentiality, and any applicable legal guidelines for external communication. Get permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to the State. All statements must be true and not misleading and all claims must be substantiated and approved. Never comment on anything related to legal matters, litigation, or any parties the State may be in litigation with without the appropriate approval. If you want to write about other government entities, make sure you know what you are talking about and that you have any needed permissions. Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and any sensitive, restricted, or confidential information. What is published is widely accessible, not easily retractable, and will be around for a long time, so consider the content carefully.
• Knowledgeable—Make sure you write and post about your areas of expertise, especially as related to the State and your assignments. If you are writing about a topic that the State is involved with but you are not the State expert on the topic, you should make this clear to your readers. Write in the first person. If you publish to a Website outside the State, please use a disclaimer something like this: “The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the State of Utah’s positions, strategies, or opinions.” Respect brand, trademark, copyright, fair use, disclosure of processes and methodologies, confidentiality, and financial disclosure laws. If you have any questions about these, see your agency legal representative. Remember, you are personally responsible for your content.
• Perception—In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred. By identifying yourself as a State employee, you are creating perceptions about your expertise and about the State by legislative stakeholders, customers, business partners, and the general public, and perceptions about you by your colleagues and managers. Be sure that all content associated with you is consistent with your work and with the State’s values and professional standards.
• Conversational—Talk to your readers like you would talk to people in professional situations. Avoid overly “composed” language. Bring in your own personality and say what is on your mind. Consider content that is open-ended and invites response. Encourage comments. Broaden the conversation by citing others who are commenting about the same topic and allowing your content to be shared or syndicated.
• Excitement—The State of Utah is making important contributions to the State and nation, to the future of government, and to public dialogue on a broad range of issues. Our activities are focused on providing services and on government innovation that benefits citizens and stakeholders. Share with the participants the things we are learning and doing, and open up social media channels to learn from others.
• Value—There is a lot of written content in the social media environment. The best way to get yours read is to write things that people will value. Social communication from the State should help citizens, partners, and co-workers. It should be thought-provoking and build a sense of community. If it helps people improve knowledge or skills, build their businesses, do their jobs, solve problems, or understand the State better, then it is adding value.
• Leadership—There can be a fine line between healthy debate and incendiary reaction. Do not denigrate others or the State. It is not necessary to respond to every criticism or barb. Frame what you write to invite differing points of view without inflaming others. Some topics, like politics, slide easily into sensitive territory. Be careful and considerate. Once the words are out there, you cannot get them back. Once an inflammatory discussion gets going, it is hard to stop.
• Responsibility—What you write is ultimately your responsibility. Participation in social computing on behalf of the State is not a right but a privilege.
• Pause—If you are about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, do not post the statement. Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what is bothering you, then fix it. If you are still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or agency legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours, as is the responsibility, and any possible repercussions.
• Mistakes—If you make a mistake, admit it. Be upfront and be quick with your correction. If you are posting to a blog, you may choose to modify an earlier post. Make it clear that you have done so.
One area where it gets tricky is what employees do in their own time with their personal social networking profiles—the line blurs between what affects your brand and business, and what is none of your business. Especially if you have nonsalaried employees who get paid by the hour, anything they do on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn related to your business after hours technically counts as overtime. If this is desirable, you need a way to track this time spent. If this is not desirable, make sure you include in your policy that such employees are not allowed to do any company business on social networking sites except during business hours.
Of course, having a social media policy is pointless if your employees don’t know about it. Training and education are an important part of corporate governance. As we talked about earlier, update your new-hire orientation curriculum to include mention of both the advantages and risks of social networking. Give a short presentation about best practices and risks of social tools at your next company all-hands meeting.
Communicating a Policy to Fans
Except for minors and country restrictions, basically anyone can view and “like” any Facebook Page. And any Page fan can post on the Wall. This lowered barrier to sharing is great for engaging the community but also poses certain legal and compliance risks, especially for certain industries. Although there is no way to avoid these risks altogether (even if you’re not on Facebook, customers or employees could still be creating situations in which your business might be liable), there are ways of mitigating these risks on your Facebook Page.
The first approach is to establish ground rules for your community of fans and let them know you hold them in good faith. If it’s your policy to remove inappropriate comments, it might not be a bad idea to be transparent about that fact. A wonderful example of this comes from Dunkin’ Donuts, which created a section on “DD Facebook Etiquette” on its Facebook Page (see Figure 15.2).
Figure 15.2
Dunkin’ Donuts displays its ground rules for the community on its Facebook Page.
© 2010. DD IP Holder LLC. Used with permission.
From the looks of it, this seems to work pretty well for the Dunkin’ Donuts Page. But Dunkin’ Donuts is a well-loved brand. For other businesses, especially those in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and medicine, extra care needs to be taken to ensure that the openness of the social Web doesn’t come at the expense of compliance with government and industry regulation. At Hearsay Labs, we have worked with many customers across these industries to monitor and react in real time to these situations (see Figure 15.3).
Figure 15.3
Hearsay 360 monitoring and keyword-filtering tools enable corporate admins to quickly customize discussion blacklists and protect the company brand and protocol across all company Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.
Social Systems and Technologies
With the right culture and policy in place, we are ready to talk about the technology. In this section, we cover open versus custom networks, standards, integration, and popular business tools.
Choosing the Right Network Model
Companies have two technology options for how they want to run their customers networks: create communities on open networks such as Facebook or create custom invite-only networks using services such as Ning or Lithium (see Table 15.2).
Table 15.2 Open Networks and Custom Networks for Business
Each approach has pros and cons. Open networks benefit from better user adoption because customers, partners, and employees are already using many of these online social networking services in their personal lives. Instead of asking customers to come to you, you are going to them. But going this route also presents risks surrounding privacy, security, and intellectual property.
Closed networks, on the other hand, offer more control and focused interaction among community members, but at the expense of lower adoption and engagement. For many chief information officers (CIOs), in particular, going with closed networks might be tempting, but in doing so, they might miss out on the very aspect of online social networking that is so transformational: the collective social graph. Metcalfe’s Law tells us that the value of a social networking site goes up exponentially with the number of members. Indeed, the reach, openness, and transparency of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter make them so compelling.
Although companies might also want to adopt internal social networking and collaboration tools such as Thoughtfarmer and Lotus Connections (both introduced in Chapter 7, “Innovation and Collaboration in the Facebook Era”), these should be in addition to, not in place of, the greater opportunity of plugging into sites where employees can access and cross-pollinate ideas with customers, partners, and others outside the company.
What does this mean for companies? Legal and IT will to accept the new realities of the social Web and take extra precautions to address issues around compliance, security, and governance, as mentioned already. Social network technology providers need to continue rising to the challenge with more and better features that address enterprise requirements. A great example of this is how Facebook has partnered with companies such as Hearsay Labs to bring a trusted corporate standard for security, privacy, reliability, availability, and compliance to a traditionally consumer model. The partnership is helping make strides in addressing valid IT concerns and giving CIOs peace of mind about implementing social technologies for the enterprise.
Industry Standards and Portability
With the hundreds of social networking services and platforms that have emerged in the last few years, businesses that want to adopt these technologies face another difficult challenge around data portability. Many in the industry are calling for standards around social data to accommodate the large number of these heterogeneous open networks. OpenSocial was developed (originally by Google) as a set of open source APIs that extends functionality across any social networking site or other Web site. Having a standard set of APIs would theoretically enable developers to write an application once and have it work on any OpenSocial site. OpenSocial has since spun off from Google as its own independent nonprofit organization and is supported by an industry consortium of social networking sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5, Orkut, and Ning. More than 7,500 applications were developed on OpenSocial in its first year.
The goal of OpenSocial is to allow social applications and data to transcend the boundaries of different Web sites and particular social networking sites. It is an interesting idea with a large number of participating vendors, but it will work only if steps are taken to define the data visibility and security rules across applications on each site.
A separate initiative, OpenID, is an open and decentralized standard for user authentication that enables users to log in to different Web sites with a single digital identity. Instead of having to create a separate user name and password for each site, users can create an OpenID once and have single sign-on to sites that support the system.
Integration
Although Facebook actually supports OpenID as an alternate way to log into the site when you already have an account, it is also trying to create a proprietary single sign-on system around Facebook for Websites (which, as we discussed in Chapter 1, “The Fourth Revolution,” is a way for Web sites to let users log in with their Facebook credentials). As the dominant players in this space, it is not in the best interest of companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to fully standardize their functionality. Instead, they (and just about every social networking site) have invested heavily in building out rich platforms and APIs to make it easy for external Web sites to integrate with their services.
To get started, you (or your IT staff) can review the API documentation here:
• Facebook—http://developers.facebook.com
• LinkedIn—http://developer.linkedin.com
• Twitter—http://apiwiki.twitter.com
Perhaps because of its simplicity, Twitter has been the most aggressive about opening its API for integration and encouraging outside parties to build applications on top of its real-time stream “plumbing.” Here are some thoughts from Ray Valdes of Gartner Group on how Twitter is like an “information bus” for the Web.
Twitter as an “Information Bus” for the Web
Ray Valdes
Twitter provides an API or programming interface that makes it easy for other social sites to integrate with. Because the Twitter notion of identity and relationships is not as rich and robust as Facebook, there are different scenarios and modes of use. Twitter makes it really use to use it as a broadcast medium and share information with the world. For example, Plancast is a social site that centers on events, calendars, and plans (in some ways, it’s a next generation of sites such as Eventful and Upcoming). Users of Plancast create calendar entries with public events that they will be attending, such as an industry conference. When you join or create an event on Plancast, you can optionally publish this event to Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter can be viewed as the “information bus” for the social Web, and the simplicity of its programming interface makes it easy to broadcast information to this channel. A large crop of location-oriented ventures, such as Gowalla, BrightKite, Loopt, FourSquare, and ZoomInfo, uses Twitter (and Facebook) as a content broadcast or content syndication mechanisms.
Ray Valdes (@rayval) is the vice president of research at Gartner Group.
Popular Tools
If you’re short on resources (and even if you’re not), there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel: Thousands of social media applications have emerged to tackle different common business areas. Table 15.3 is by no means an exhaustive list, but it covers some of the most popular tools companies are using today.
Table 15.3 Popular Social Tools for Business
Enterprise adoption of social tools requires culture change before anything else, followed by process and policy, and then technology.
Although it’s important to have an executive sponsor, the most successful corporate initiatives are collaborative across multiple departments, including IT.
The leaders of today and tomorrow are learning to give up “control” and are instead inspiring and listening to their employees and customers.
Companies have a choice of cultivating communities on public networks such as Facebook and Twitter, or developing their own custom networks on Ning, Lithium, Jive, or other vendor systems. Even in the latter case, companies should be monitoring and tying back public discussions on Facebook and Twitter to these private forums.
All the popular social networking sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, offer APIs that allow for custom development and integration.
> > > TIPS and TODO ’s
Form a cross-functional social media council with representatives from marketing, IT, legal/compliance, individual brands’ business units, and others.
Always tie social efforts back to established business priorities, to rally support as well as align vision and expectations.
Identify and honestly communicate social media’s risks to your business, such as privacy and security, intellectual property, and employee productivity. Use these to drive your social media guidelines.
As part of your social media policy, make sure you come up with a transition plan in case certain employees leave the company or a team decides to abandon its Facebook Page.
Consider developing a social media policy for fans and communicating that on your company’s social network presence, similar to what Dunkin’ Donuts has done on its Facebook Page.