According to a new study , enterprises continue to deploy social networking tools at an increasing pace. At the same time, though, this Cisco-sponsored study also found that a surprisingly small number of businesses have implemented formal processes and policies related to their use of social media. IT departments have also been left out of the loop when it comes to the adoption of social media tools. Only 10% of the respondents currently involve their IT departments as primary decision makers when it comes to choosing technologies for externally facing social networking initiatives. Sponsor This study was sponsored by Cisco and carried out by the IESE Business School in Spain, the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S. and the Henley Business School in the United Kingdom. The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 100 companies in Europe, Asia and Africa. These businesses were selected because they were early adopters of social media tools. Most of the interviewed companies are using social networks (75%) and micro-blogging tools (50%) as their primary tools to reach their audiences. The study found that social networking tools like blogs, Yammer, Facebook and Twitter are now being used by almost every department in these businesses. The Honeymoon is Over As Neil Hair, assistant professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology and one of the lead researchers of this study told us yesterday, it is also important to note that “the honeymoon period” for social media in the enterprise is coming to an end. Early projects were often led by one or two early adopters who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of using social media tools in their companies. Now, more and more companies are seeing social media as an integral part in how they communicate with customers and vendors. Missing Pieces: Governance and IT Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between “the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight.” Very few companies (1 in 10) report that their IT departments are directly involved in their social networking initiatives. As these tools become more important, however, the the demand on IT to integrate these tools into the existing infrastructure will surely rise as well. Discuss

Read more from the original source:
Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies

Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla . Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. The impact of the integration has the potential to be significant, as Drupal in particular is one of the most widely-used content management systems in use on the Web today, powering sites from WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.gov to TheOnion.com and websites for celebrities and musicians like Britney Spears and Eric Clapton. Joomla is used by such institutions as Harvard, MTV and Citibank. Sponsor Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect’s social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose. In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site’s entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs . “Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins,” writes developer and open-source aficionado Mauro González in Google’s Social Web blog post. “Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features – all without writing a single line of code.” GFC represents an interesting – and perhaps underused – suite of tools in an increasingly competitive space. Many site owners are adding social features to blogs and sites through systems such as JS-Kit’s Echo or Disqus , and Joomla and Drupal both have many extensions and plugins to allow for the same kinds of features and functions. Still, making GFC available for the CMSes that power many highly visible sites around the Web might do a lot of good for that product. Overall, we see this announcement as indicative of a set of trends: Portable user identities, highly interactive content, portable communities and open-source software. What do you think: Will more site users be integrating Friend Connect to allow for more social website experiences? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss

Read the rest here:
Google Brings Friend Connect, Social Features to Drupal & Joomla

Eric Eldon at InsideFacebook reports that the social network has begun experimenting with a new option for users to report the senders of friend requests as someone they don’t actually know. The prompt appears after you click to ignore a friend request. Actually knowing a person isn’t a requirement to be their friend on Facebook (unlike LinkedIn, for example), so this is an odd choice of words, but presumably the vast majority of the site’s users do only want to be friends with people they’ve met. Facebook has strict limits on the number of messages and friend requests a person can send, but apparently that hasn’t worked well enough. Sponsor Two years ago MySpace added a requirement that any friend requests sent had to be verified as human using a CAPTCHA. That cut spam friend requests on MySpace down dramatically. There is no such requirement on Facebook. Dealing with information overload and spam are key steps in creating and maintaining a user experience that keeps people coming back to non-essential websites like social networks – as opposed to email, which you’ll keep using anyway because you have to. According to Eldon, Facebook hasn’t determined yet what it will do with these reports when filed. We regularly hear about people claiming abuse by the Facebook anti-spam team but every time we call Facebook about one of those complaints, the company’s response seems quite reasonable. People do a lot of obnoxious things on Facebook. I don’t know any of those people, though, and plan on clicking a button that says so when the opportunity arises. Discuss

Read the rest here:
Facebook Adds Zap-a-Spammer Button

The American Dialect Society (ADS) has named google – the verb – as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to “search the Internet”) won out over blog, which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS’s New Word Committee, “just sounds ugly.” Tweet was named the top word of the year for 2009. Fail – “a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful” – was 2009′s most useful word. Sponsor Definitions: Tweet : noun , a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message. Google : Verb meaning “to search the Internet.” Generic form of the trademarked “Google,” the world’s dominant Internet search engine. Fail : A noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful. Usually written as “FAIL!” The ADS’s members include linguists, grammarians, etymologists, writers, editors and university students. The ADS was founded in 1889. Twitter and other social networks have clearly captured the imagination of many language societies. Twitter was the top word of in the Global Language Monitor ‘s survey, and unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the year. To represent the 1990s, the ADS picked Web as the top word of the decade. Do You Agree? What do you think? Do you think google deserves to be the one word that represents the last decade? Or is this just another example of how Google is succeeding in its slow takeover of our culture? Discuss

See the original post here:
Google: The Word of the Decade

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December. In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington , Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny. Sponsor Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington’s question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. I’ll post those sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00. Zuckerberg: “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’ “And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. “A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” That’s Not a Believable Explanation This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.” I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending. Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook. This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web. Facebook’s Different Stories First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people. Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told me in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too. The Flimsy Evidence What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook. Facebook’s Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV. But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways? The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday. (Why didn’t Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?) This is Very Important Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it. I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true. Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users’ desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect. Discuss

Read the original post:
Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

We’ve been in a globe-trotting mood for the past two weeks here at the ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, adding new conferences and seminars in London and Australia. As always, you can download the entire event calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us . Sponsor 11 January 2010: Nashville, Tennessee Social Fresh Nashville This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Nashville will have 30-plus speakers, including Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, Gavin Baker of Ruby Tuesday and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart). ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code “RWW15″. 14 January 2010: Palo Alto, California The Founder Showcase The Founder Showcase , by TheFunded.com, is an open startup pitch and networking event that highlights the newest cutting-edge businesses and helps innovators gain traction among the Silicon Valley elite. On Thursday, January 14th, 10 of the most promising early-stage companies, as selected by over 13,000 registered Founders and CEOs on TheFunded.com, will present to an audience of over 300 investors, founders, and members of the press. A panel of experts will critique the pitches, and an open ballot of those in attendance will determine the Founder Showcase Winner. ReadWriteWeb readers receive a 10% discount when registering, just use discount code “RWW”. 20 January 2010: London New Digital Revenue Streams Seminar Madgex and Abacus e-Media are hosting a free seminar that will offer advice and case studies from media organisations that have successfully created a direct impact on profit margins. The event is supported by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and Haymarket-owned Brand Republic, and will feature speakers, including David Archer, CEO of Scottish Television. The breakfast seminar takes place at the Council Chambers, Law Society, 113 Chancery Lane, London from 8.30-11 a.m. (registration and breakfast from 8.15 a.m.). To register, book here or email marleen.kinder@madgex.com . 26 January 2010: San Francisco, California Catalyst Conference Vator.tv , a leading platform for entrepreneurs and innovators to broadcast themselves, and provider of news and information through VatorNews, and Girls in Tech, a social network enterprise focused on education and empowerment of influential women in technology, are seeking five women-led startups across any stage to present at the Catalyst Conference on January 26, 2010 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. To be one of the five, join the Catalyst competition today and win the chance to present. 27 – 28 January 2010: Amsterdam, The Netherlands Enterprise Social 2.0: Rip or ROI? This senior executive event will bring together decision makers from the Top Fortune companies to discuss innovative strategies on how to maximise business performance through social media engagement. The event will include keynote speeches, best-practice presentations as well as interactive discussion sessions. The summit will provide excellent opportunities for you to hear international experts discuss best practices on how to drive business performance using Web 2.0 and social media. Key issues to be discussed include: How to integrate social media programs successfully into business strategies? Building business momentum, visibility and market growth through social media Measuring success and influence using metrics and analytics: what are the tools and techniques Integrating viral marketing and social media into traditional marketing mix Developing and activating audiences using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs 1 – 5, February 2010: New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto, São Paulo Social Media Week The second annual Social Media Week conference will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large. The conference is designed as a series of localized events, which city partners are responsible for organizing. Programs will span a variety of formats, ranging from talks and panel discussions, to interactive workshops, seminars and networking events. Registration will open in January 2010 and the majority of events will be free thanks to the global sponsors and event partners. You can find more information at http://socialmediaweekny.com . 4 February 2010: San Francisco, California Vator Splash Vator.tv , a leading platform for innovators and entrepreneurs to broadcast themselves, is holding its inaugural Vator Splash event on February 4, 2010 at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco. Catch onstage presenters: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, Smule CEO Jeff Smith, August Capital VC Howard Hartenbaum and Google Ventures VC Bill Maris. Ten promising startups will also get to present onstage. Enter the Vator Splash competition if you want to present. ReadWriteWeb readers get a 25% discount on their tickets using the code VatorReadWriteWeb . 8 February 2010: Tampa, Florida Social Fresh Tampa This is the social media conference that comes to you. Social Fresh is a one-day, case-study-rich conference targeted for marketers. Social Fresh Tampa will have 30+ speakers, including Chris Barger of GM, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group and John Andrews of Collective Bias (formerly of Walmart). ReadWriteWeb readers get a 15% discount with the code “RWW15″. 10 February 2010: New York City Online Community Unconference East The Online Community Unconference East is a gathering of online community professionals – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners. The event runs from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Digital Sandbox. 11 February 2010: New York City NYC Venture Capital and Angel Showcase FundingPost is hosting a VC showcase where 20-plus VC funds and angel groups will be exhibiting their firms during a great cocktail party setting. Each fund will have their own table setup for the sole purpose of meeting great new companies. Additionally, there will be an optional pitching workshop from 2:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. The cost to participate in the workshop will be $400. This workshop includes the $125 ticket to the event, and a 1/4 page listing in the Venture Guide Magazine. This event is sponsored by Credit Suisse, and takes place at One Madison Avenue, from 6-9:15 p.m. 18 February 2010: Silicon Valley, California Future of Funding Active limited partners, top rated venture capitalists, and successful entrepreneurs are invited to Silicon Valley on February 18, 2010 to discuss the Future of Funding. The venture capital bubble has burst, and change is coming. Now is the time to have a constructive dialog about the future with all of the stakeholders at the table. Don’t miss the opportunity to partake in this exclusive event hosted by TheFunded . Please visit www.futureoffunding.com to see speaker and event details. ReadWriteWeb readers use the code “RWW” and get 10% off. 15 – 16 March 2010: London, England 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum — London The 2nd Annual Social Networking World Forum takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. The two-day event features four dedicated conference streams: Social Networking World Forum Enterprise social media Social TV World Forum Mobile Social Networking Forum The event features key speakers from global brands, organizations, social networking publishers and developers, pioneering social media leaders, top agencies, content producers, and more. Full workshop program within exhibition area Evening networking reception Pre-show online meeting planner for delegates Free pass for exhibition only 7 – 9 April 2010: Sydney, Australia ConnectNow ConnectNow brings together international specialists and thought leaders in social media, emerging technologies and their intersection with business. Learn how the realtime web, location based services, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and personalised services are changing marketing and communications. Understand the importance of trust in relationship marketing and what is “social currency”. For more info email info@connectnow.net.au . 11 May 2010: San Francisco, California FinovateSpring FinovateSpring 2010 will again showcase the most cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations to Silicon Valley and the world. With Finovate’s signature mix of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) from handpicked companies and intimate networking time with their executives, this conference packs a ton of unique value into a single day. Come see the cutting edge of banking and financial technology and network with hundreds of the leading financial executives, venture capitalists, press, industry analysts, bloggers and fintech entrepreneurs. Early bird registration rates are available. 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today’s market. Early bird registration rates are available. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss

Read the original:
ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 9 January 2010

In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public’s sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we’ve been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them. Sponsor LEARNING : A few months ago Bessemer Associate Sarah Tavel wrote an article entitled

More here:
How Blogging and Tweeting Leaders Build Better Teams