How regulated organisations can deal with social networking issues

In my last post I raised the point that in amongst the excuses applied in some organisations, particularly regulated ones, to avoid letting employees use social media, there are some real issues. This post looks at some of them, and proposes solutions.

I can think of four main types of issue, which I'll call, respectively, Conduct Unbecoming, Company Secrets, Off-the-Record Contracting and Chinese Walls. Let's look at each in turn.

Conduct Unbecoming

This rather old-fashioned expression I take to mean anything that an employee might say that the firm would not wish to be associated with its name. This could be inside or outside the firewall. The fears are more reputational than regulatory, although for internal-only material they may well be more about power and the prevention of the usurping thereof.

It should be possible to deal with both instances (inside and outside the firewall) by means of a policy. I'm tempted to say this could be as short as "Don't give away company secrets and don't diss the firm", but it will probably be a little longer and more formal than that. Nevertheless, that's basically the message. Whistleblowing rights would of course remain, but those aside a company can reasonably expect some measure of loyalty and good behaviour from its people.

Company Secrets

This covers commercially confidential material, client confidential material and so on. There's an art to saying something interesting online that doesn't breach confidences. Ever since the invention of email people have been learning the hard way that people react differently to opinions expressed in writing as opposed to face-to-face or on the phone, especially when the opinions are negative. It's not a simple matter to craft work-related posts that are interesting to you and your readers, and at the same time won't upset your boss. But this art must be learnt, because short of never mentioning work online - which probably means not being online at all - everyone will have to face up to the consequences of getting it wrong. As far as the company's concerned, again policies have a role, but they might amount to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Someone who doesn't understand 'netiquette' might blunder even though s/he's read the policy, and once that tweet or Facebook post's in the public domain it's too late. So there's a role for training here: in how to use social media effectively and safely in a work-related context.

Off-the-Record Contracting

This is the issue of people using unofficial channels to record or make agreements which could bind the firm legally. The issue isn't so much about secret or under-the-counter deals - intentional concealment - as people wanting to do them will always find a way, and there are legal sanctions available to deal with transgressions. It's more about the fact that there's a grey area between the conversations that lead up to a deal, and the formal contract documents. A firm can't afford to lose track of even the 'grey' bits. That is very tricky even if email were to be the only channel used, both in relation to finding stuff later and to dealing with multiple email accounts and platforms. Banks that I have worked for tend to block webmail at work to try to deal with the second point. (As for finding stuff for, for example, disclosure purposes, social media platforms can score over email there, but that's a bit off topic). The problem with blocking email, as opposed to making it a policy not to use non-firm email for business purposes, is it's a slippery slope towards banning all non-firm communication platforms. This can mean no access to (public) blogs, wikis, social networking sites and so on. in fact, no Web 2.0 at all. For me, that's throwing the baby out with the bath water. A better approach would be to state in a policy that such channels shouldn't be used for anything that could have contractual implications. But, of course, the regulators, and not just the firms, need to be convinced that this is satisfactory before it has a chance of flying.

Chinese Walls

A well-known concept in banking circles, the Chinese Wall is a necessary separation of communication between certain departments, usually to prevent conflicts of interest. Any 'social' platforms must take them into account. Broadly, there are two possible approaches. the first is to make all social platforms inside the firewall accessible to everyone in the firm, and make it clear that no discussion that should be bounded by a Chinese Wall should appear on them. This has the virtues of simplicity, clarity and ease of maintenance. Its downside is that it precludes the use of social tools within a Chinese Wall, which can seriously limit useful knowledge-sharing and collaboration. If a firm does decide to allow confidential social platforms it needs to be aware that it could let itself in for a big maintenance overhead - as I know from experience! The chances are that your Active Directory (or equivalent) does not flag people with the characteristics that your Chinese-wall-related privacy settings require on your social platform. Therefore, you'll need to have someone constantly adding leavers and joiners of the department or project in question, possibly by hand. It's wise to think hard at the outset how you can best set things up to minimise this manual effort. If you use Sharepoint, make sure you fully understand how security-enabled groups work.

Policing

Whether you adopt the approach that, broadly, I'm recommending, namely to allow quite liberal access to Web 2.0 sites outside the firewall and encourage their equivalent inside it, and deal with potential 'issues' by means of policies and training, or you decide to 'batten down the hatches' and block or ban most things Web 2.0, you'll probably wonder how you can police what's actually going on. In an ideal world you'll have trusted and trustworthy employees who are netiquette-savvy and won't put a foot wrong. If they do, however, you will probably want to know about it. But how to do this?

You might run searches for the company name on, say, Google. This should pick up most stuff on public platforms. It won't pick up 'walled' material like email, of course, or Facebook posts behind privacy settings. Then, of course, as there's no search that I know of that will pick up only 'inappropriate' comments about the firm, there will be a lot of link-clicking and reading for somebody to do. Auto-moderation software exists, and I'm guessing this could pick up combinations of swear words plus company name, for example, thus narrowing things down. But there might still be a lot to read, and as I said earlier, it will be after the fact. So you might decide not to monitor at all, and just deal with incidents as they arise and are made known.

A bit scary? Welcome to the new world! Now's maybe the time to reflect on the way your employees might feel about the firm, and, if that feeling's more negative, overall, than positive, whether it's actually realistic to try to keep the lid on that.

Clever old Twitter

When I first came across Twitter, I thought, "What the heck is the point of that?". Later, I came to see the value of it for at least one specific purpose: following the movements of my preferred candidate for mayor of London. Recently, I've found myself using it more and more. Why is this?

I think there are are a number of reasons why Twitter hits the spot in a way that no other social software tool does. Firstly, it is simple. You post, you follow people, and people follow you. Not difficult, that. Secondly, despite this simplicity, it succeeds in blending together the features of a number of other types of tool. This makes it either the best of a number of worlds or a decent compromise, depending on your point of view. The first of these features is the 'friends' concept of Facebook and LinkedIn, but with a twist. Whereas in the former social networks a relationship cannot exist unless it is reciprocated, on Twitter it can be one way. This, for me, 'lowers the bar' when it comes to deciding whom to follow, whom (if anyone) to block, and if/when to de-follow somebody. None of this feels as personal and therefore possibly hurtful as it would on Facebook or LinkedIn. And the consequence is better 'liquidity' of contacts. There need be no stale ones.

The way contacts work on Twitter also makes it easy to select the people you want to follow - by seeing who the people that you follow, or might wish to follow, follow. This is possible on Facebook and LinkedIn, at least to some extent, too. But that reciprocation thing gets in the way.

The second feature is the threads concept of forums. However, whereas in forums, threads are very central to the way a forum works, in Twitter they are very weak. The only way a thread manifests itself is as an @ reply, which links a response to an original comment. At least I think this is the case - any Twitterers reading this who know otherwise, please correct me. De-emphasising threads is arguably no bad thing. At least it prevents the sort of rambles/flames/rants that can spoil the debate on forums.

The third feature is the blogging concept. Or, in Twitter's case microblogging. It's blogging because it's relatively standalone - the blogger on his or her soapbox. But it's different because of the limitation in length of post - 140 characters or 15-20 words. Despite the fact that it's possible to cheat by breaking up a long post into 140 character chunks, this length limitation in practice works to make authors be concise and be interesting - particularly as they would not wish their adoring followers to desert them.

And now for Twitter's pièce de résistance: intimacy with celebrities (as it were). I do not know if this is merely a function of Twitter's newness, or if it will endure. But at the moment it really does feel that if you follow a celebrity Twitterer you are getting a more intimate view of their life than you ever would through other media. Personally, at the moment I'm following Lance Armstrong, John Cleese and Stephen Fry. There are many aspects of celebrity, and the way the broadcast media handle it, that I usually hate. Somehow Twitter turns celebrities back into normal people again. The posts I've seen seem totally authentic, you know they aren't getting paid to do it, and there's always the tantalising thought that you might get an @ reply to one of your comments.

Finally, I think Twitter would be a very good tool for the enterprise. It could either be within the firewall (I think Yammer is an enterprise Twitter-like product for this) or Twitter itself could be used, probably with certain precautions. It could be used to let colleagues know where each other is and what they are doing, but also to create the 'loose ties' of people in different departments or locations that have so much potential for mutual help.

I have converted from Twitter sceptic to Twitter fan. How about you?

'Knowledge management' again

In a Google group related to content management I saw a post today about KM. Someone had been tasked with setting up a KM system but didn't know how to go about it. This prompted me to comment along the following lines.

It's possible to argue endlessly about what 'knowledge
management' means. I think what most organisations want (or should
want) is an information management system which includes not only
formal-ish documents like reports, but conversations. The latter is
where blogs come in. Old-style KM tried to make people enter
'knowledge' into separate systems - they didn't want to and didn't
have the time. A better approach is to have them write in blogs,
discussion groups and wikis as part of their work, so that the
information is captured and is accessible to all. This is in stark
contrast to information that resides on shared drives and email. You
can give it structure through tagging, enabling the creation of a
folksonomy. This is an ad hoc taxonomy, less controlled (and a bit
more hit-and-miss) but still useful and better than free-text
searching alone. Pop in an RSS feed and people can subscribe to the
subject areas or authors they are interested in. The hard bit is
weaning people off the tools they are used to - email, Word documents
and Powerpoints on shared drives. Old habits die hard.

Do you agree?

Blogs don't have to be for blogging

..And wikis don't have to be encyclopedias.

A blog is a website with a predetermined format - posts in date sequence. It doesn't have to be used for writing an online diary or collection of online musings.

A wiki is a website that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is the only wiki that many people have heard of, so these people often think wiki equals encyclopedia.

What might an organisation's collection of written material be like if was all on blogs and wikis?