Working for an HR Software provider I attend my fair share of HR events. A topic that has been trending in the conferences and seminars for a few years is the opportunity and challenge that social media presents the industry.

Essentially the debate goes like this… Social media enables people to communicate quickly and easily with one another and has the potential to aid collaboration among our employees. Yay, we like that, surely social media is a force for good. But wait, didn’t I just say that social media enables people to communicate quickly and easily with one another? This means slurs against your organisation have the potential to go viral, potentially reaching millions of people around the world in minutes. Boo, hiss, social media is dangerous. Cue calls for companies to simultaneously embrace social media while maintaining a level of control that would make Orwellian Thought Police blush with pride.

My own belief is that the control argument is futile. Human beings have thrived because of our ability and innate desire to communicate with one another. Urban legends and scare stories (think “Kentucky Fried Rat” or “Cling Film Causes Cancer”) used to go viral long before the internet; it just took longer and was harder to implicate someone for taking part.

Social media, by its very nature, is an open form of communication. Even if I send what I think is a private message, doesn’t mean that the recipient will keep it private. It’s the combination of the openness of social media with the ability to prove somebody has posted something online that poses a risk for employees. Employees need to be aware of how they conduct themselves online, as people can and have been sacked for what they’ve posted.

Featured image by Wirawat Lian-udom / Flickr (CC)

There are numerous examples of people who’ve found themselves looking for a new job following a misjudged Facebook post or Twitter rant. Typically they fall into 10 categories, some examples are below:

1. Breaching Privacy Laws: In California, five nurses are facing the sack after it was found they were discussing patient cases on Facebook.

2. Insulting Your Boss: A famous Facebook fail in 2009 involved a woman, known only as Lindsay, who posted a less than flattering post about her boss, forgetting that she’d accepted him as a friend on the social network. When her boss stumbled across the post, her six-month trial period ended pretty swiftly.

3. Insulting Your Colleagues: A call centre worker was fired after posting a comment on Facebook calling one of her colleagues a “brown nosing cow”. She was dismissed for breaching the company’s Internet policy that “staff should not post comments that could be regarded as bullying, harassment or discrimination.”

4. Insulting Your Customers: A waitress was fired from her job at a pizza restaurant for branding two of their customers “Cheap” on Facebook. While she didn’t give the names of the restaurant goers, she did mention the company name. She was fired for “violating the company’s social media policy.”

5. Disparaging Remarks About Your Company: 13 Virgin Airline crew members were dismissed after publicly discussing aspects of their job on Facebook, including the number of times an airplane’s engines had been replaced and that their cabin was currently infested with bugs. Oh. They also called their passengers “Chavs” for good measure. (See point 4. Insulting Your Customers.)

6. Causing Offence: Liberal Democrat MP Colin Eldridge got rid of his online campaign organiser after posting a comment asking “all religious people to just *&@^ off.” In case there were any atheists in the constituency he’d managed to not offend, he also posted a link to an article saying certain people should be “banned from breeding,” including “vile women with too many kids.”

7. Sharing Corporate IP: Nicole Crowther had been a recurring extra in the hit TV show Glee when she decided to tweet future storylines to her followers. Her message “K is PQ and Ka is PK” was easily deciphered by her fans as a spoiler for who would be prom King and Queen. When the show’s creator, Brad Falchuck, got wind of this he simply replied to her tweet with “@nicolecrowther, Hope you’re qualified to do something other than work in entertainment.” Needless to say Nicole was a recurring extra no more.

8. Busted Pulling a Sickie: An employee from insurance firm National Suisse who called into work claiming to be suffering from a migraine needed to lie in a darkened room rather than look at her computer screen. When her employer found her posting comments on Facebook, it became clear her apparent migraine was just a ploy for an extra day off. She no longer works for the firm. 

9. Amount Time Spent Online While At Work: Dozens of council staff have been disciplined in the north of England for inappropriate use of the Internet, with at least one member of staff being fired for “excessive use of Facebook”. A recent freedom of information request found that Facebook was accessed by Stockton Council computers over 7 million times in 2011.

10. Proof You Behave Like an Idiot: Staff from Great Western Hospital in Swindon were fired after playing the “Lying Down on the Job” game. They were discovered after posting photos of themselves lying down on hospital floors, the helipad, and even resuscitation tables. Not smart.

Conclusion

Would you want your hospital to employ staff who discussed your medical records on Facebook? Thought not. Would you phone your boss, call him a “pervy w&^*#^” and expect to keep your job? I doubt it. What would you do if you owned a restaurant and one of your waitresses purposefully insulted your customers to their face? 

The underlying theme for all of the above dismissals is that the protagonists behaved unprofessionally. If used in a professional way, social media is no more a threat to a person’s employment than email, the phone, or good old word of mouth.

Guest author David Richter is the Marketing Manager for Octopus HR, a company that provides online HR Software for SMEs in the UK.

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Gerry Moran, a MarketingThink.com blogger, shares the following 5 steps to using social media for your company. The steps are creatively presented as given by Yoda, one of the greatest Jedi masters who ever lived in the history of the Star Wars universe. Apparently, a marketer wanted help on becoming a ‘social media jedi.’

Moran emphasizes that activating a personal social brand on social media platforms is different from activating social media messaging on these channels. When customers and potential customers access your company’s social media page, it should be a humanizing experience to them.

Moran says that the brand is extended and amplified by regularly putting up status updates, making these updates relevant by including links to informative articles, sharing relevant blog posts, liking posts, and commenting, retweeting liking and sharing.

Here are Moran’s 5 steps to incorporate social media into your company.

1. Set an objective before you start using social media. You should ask yourself why you need to start social media for your work. The following are examples of simple yet effective goals. First, you want to start using social media so that you can expand the reach of the message of your company. Second, use social media to provide content that is relevant to the needs and the interests of your audience.

2. Improve the “curbside appeal” of your social media profile. Moran suggests that you should make your social media profiles, such as your Twitter or LinkedIn profiles, smart and neat so that you can get your audience to purchase from you.

For the most part the only important part of a search engine results page is the first page. In particular, studies show that 94 percent of searchers only scan the first page. Your LinkedIn profiles, although they rank higher than other social media profiles, will only make it to the first page if it is complete.

In addition, making your social media profile neat, trim, elegant and smart can only do good things with regards to your credibility.

3. Track, then Talk. Observe by stalking a couple of social media channels from some companies, thought leaders, media publications, competition, prospects, clients and coworkers. Use their guide so that you will know what kind of content to share, what words you should use, and the links that you should provide.

Moran points out that social media content has a rule of thumb: 1 percent create content, 9 percent revise content, and 90 percent read content. You should be a part of the 10 percent that create and revise content, so that you can reach the 90 percent who read.

4. Be an expert of a few social media channels. According to InSites Consulting, the maximum number of brands that an average person interacts with is five. Moran suggests that you should not concentrate on just using one social media channel; neither should you try out a lot of channels at the same time. First, be an expert in Hootsuite, Twitter and LinkedIn, then try out other channels after that.

In particular, Moran says that you can use LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out to people who aren’t following you. Hootsuite is also useful for social network integration for various social media channels, helping you manage your messaging and listening.

5. Understand the Rules of Engagement. The rules of engagement have differences for each social media channel. This implies that for each social media channel, you should know what the best message timing, cadence, tone and overall style should be. In order to make a difference, you need to know how to deliver that right LinkedIn status or make that one or more effective tweets.

So these are the 5 steps to incorporate social media into your business as shared by Moran. The following is the infographic version of the list, featuring Yoda the Jedi master.

Being a “social media jedi” can be done in 5 steps as suggested by Gerry Moran. (Image: via business2community.com)

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More and more people are using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites at work. However, Michael Wertheim of motherboard.vice.com reminds us that our bosses can meddle with our social media accounts if they choose to.

When we arrive at work, we tend to open one of our social media accounts as soon as possible, so that we can get updated with significant and insignificant news. It has become a regular habit to us. For others, though, social media is a very important part of their lives, which is a good thing, but so much so that when employers suddenly implement a ban on using social media in the work place, these people will feel burdened.

According to a recent study conducted by Intelligent Office, one third of employees spend 1 hour or more on social networking sites while they are at work.  The same study revealed that 25 percent of the respondents or 1,000 American or Canadian employees won’t work for a firm that bans social media use at work. This study shows that employees now see the use of social media as a right, and not just a business tool or an extravagance.

Employees feel that being able to use social media at work is a right, but they should be careful because privacy rights are often waived at work, and employers can snoop in to your work social media profile. (Image: Orfeest (CC) via Flickr)

Employers can look into our Private Social Media Accounts

When using our social media accounts at work, Wertheim reminds us that our employers can, and are most likely, observing what we do in our computers. Your privacy expectations at work should be so much lower than at home, because that is just reality. Evidently, it is best to expect that you have basically zero privacy rights when using social media to interconnect with others from your computers at work.

In fact, your privacy rights in the office are relinquished as your bosses can access every click you make using keystroke trackers and they can also browse your internet history and check out your internet message chats, stored files and downloads.

Your employer can read every email that you send from your work place as these emails pass through the server of the company you are working on. That includes your private emails. In social media sites, your messages can be read as well.

The 4^th amendment does not stop employers from doing these things. What that amendment does is stop the government from using illegal searches from time to time.

Federal law even permits employers to listen to the phone calls that you make, and only stop listening when they realize the call is personal. Your text messages can also be read from your work phone.  There is no reason to suppose that your work phone has privacy.

Social Media or Privacy

Social media can be an important tool for business or a place to chat about senseless stuff. In both cases, employees feel that they should have the privilege to use social media sites while at work; eight hours per day of work, after all, can be a bit dull. As an employee, you have to choose between social media or privacy.

Employers would like to prevent employees from vigorously using social networking sites during work hours as much as they can. This is because they want to put their liabilities to a minimum. More social media use, greater risk of company time theft, trade secret exposes, and harassment suits.

On the other hand, companies also want to be productive and relevant. That can be done by using social media for marketing, and for generating leads and sales. If that is the case, then, employees should use social media with utmost care , knowing that their privacy rights can be given up at work.

Social Media Privacy Rights can be Waived at the Work Place Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

A Facebook engineer who helped build the News Feed told InsideFacebook.com that only 1 out of 500 stories will make it through the News Feed. That was six years ago. The social network has yet to update the statistic, but it’s highly likely that its algorithm, EdgeRank, filters more stories now than in 2007.

PostRocket, a Facebook Marketing blog, has released a new infographic that confirms two things: the news feed is competitive, more than ever, and photo posts dominate it.

The number of photo posts from November 2011 to January 2013 grew from 20 percent to 50 percent – a 150 percent increase that proves how user engagement on Facebook is leaning towards status updates with images. Facebook marketers have to take advantage of this statistic.

Photo post optimization starts with the proper dimensions so ensure that it meets Facebook’s recommended standards for photo page posts or sponsored stories, cover photos, profile pictures, and link preview images.

Without further ado, here’s the infographic by PostRocket.

Optimizing Photo Posts For Efficient Facebook Marketing [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

People who have been managing social media accounts either for personal use or for business use may have noticed that their fans on social media roughly fall into clear categories.

According to this infographic, there are seven popular types of social media fans and each type can benefit the owners of the social media accounts they follow.

The infographic, made by ReachLocal.com, also teaches social media users how to benefit from each of the seven types of fans discussed.

Here are the seven types of social media fans discussed in the infographic and what they are likely to say:

1.       The Quiet Follower – “Sometimes I’ll read your updates, if they catch my eye.”
2.       The Casual “Liker” – “I genuinely like some of the things you post.”
3.       The Deal Seeker – “Let’s make a deal; you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”
4.       The Unhappy Customer – “I had a bad experience, and I’m not afraid to talk about.”
5.       The Ranter – “I want to yell about something!”
6.       The Enthusiastic Cheerleader – “I love your brand and everything you post!!! #YouRock”
7.       The Loyal Fan – “I’ve got your back, no matter what.”

It seems counterintuitive that a Facebook Page owner or Twitter account owner will benefit from the “Unhappy Customer” or the “Ranter” but the infographic explains the challenge social media managers need to overcome to turn something negative into something positive.

How To Benefit From The 7 Popular Types Of Social Media Fans [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

Social media is so pervasive it is no wonder airlines and airports in the U.S. can be analyzed through it.

So which American commercial airlines and airports are doing great on social media?

According to this infographic from ViralHeat, the most social savvy airports are San Francisco International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

The ranking for airports was made using mentions on social media for airport names, acronyms, hashtags and Twitter handle mentions.

As for airline companies by sentiment, topping the list is AmericanAirlines. Next comes Southwest followed by Delta, Virgin America, jetBlue, and United.

As for the most popular international airlines on Twitter, British Airways leads the list followed by Air France, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, Qantas and Singapore Airlines.

The infographic also reveals the top leisure travel activities for U.S. domestic travelers.

Which American Aviation Companies And Airports Are Doing Good On Social Media? [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

The seemingly simple inclusion of an exclamation point in a tweet boosts its chances of getting retweets, new data shows.

The data comes from Dan Zarella, a social media expert, in an article on his site.

According to Zarella, he was prompted to look in to “the relationship between exclamation points in tweets and retweets and clicks” by a question from one of his followers which was aptly-sent through a tweet.

Zarella says that he used a dataset of over 2 million link-containing tweets sent by accounts with at least 1,000 followers.

The social media expert says that he “found something interesting” as “Tweets with exclamation points got more retweets-per-follower, but fewer clicks-per-follower.”

So how can social media managers use this new finding? Why include an exclamation point if it increase retweets but results in fewer click-throughs?

This may be particularly useful in campaigns that just want to spread the news so remember that the tweet should include everything needed to understand the message. Do not use links that are crucial to understand the message.

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None of us is safe. Identity thieves lurk in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to pounce on their prey. These malicious minds continually find ways to hack an unknowing victim’s social media account.

Be reserved. Be cautious. While we try to protect ourselves against cybercriminals, the names of the people we are looking for may already be in our list of friends or followers. Do not click any unfamiliar link or download files from an untrusted source.

NextAdvisor.com, a consumer information site that offers independent reviews of online services, has released a new infographic to prove the alarming presence of identity thieves on social media sites.

The study, conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research, found that more than 12 million people in the United States were victims of identity fraud in 2012.

NextAdvisor’s infographic reveals this truth with stunning statistics about identity theft on social media, educating online users to be smart in using their private information.

Most identity thieves attack social media profiles through four ways: sending a private message and asking the victim to visit a scam website, targeting an identity threat, accessing accounts without permission, phishing through socially engineered links to reveal passwords and other user info.

The study found that Americans shared these personal information on Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site: full name, family members’ names, current employer, and home address.

Hackers easily work their ways through Facebook accounts not because they are skillful with their craft, but because users either forgot to set their Facebook profiles to private or have no knowledge of their Facebook privacy settings.

Although we always are reminded to use different passwords on our social media accounts, some of us reuse these passwords not only for social media, but also for online banking. This is not safe. And we should change our online passwords at least every month to ensure that we still control our accounts.

Sometimes we need a reminder, although we know it already. As NextAdvisor would say, “It’s easy to get comfortable using social media because it is part of our everyday lives.”

Social Barrel already covered this infographic in this article written by my colleague Solon. The numbers are so alarming that we need to be reminded on how important this is.

Check out this other infographic by Protect Your Bubble, where it reveals that every three seconds someone’s online identity is stolen.

Identity theft is far from funny and passing. And this time it’s up to us to prevent it. If not, we have to fix the damage before it goes out of hand.

Is Your Private Information Safe On Social Media? [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

New privacy laws for social media have been ratified across several states in the United States. In general, these laws prohibit companies from requesting employees and job seekers that they log in to their social media accounts.

However, these new laws are also clear about special circumstances wherein companies can actually do so in a legal manner.

Protecting Employees and Job Seekers

The last state to adopt an online privacy law is Utah. The Internet Employment Privacy Act of the state went into effect last Tuesday. This law prevents companies from requesting workers to hand over their Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networking sites’ usernames and passwords.

If a company violates this and requests a certain worker for this social media information, and the worker refuses, the company cannot take oppositional action against this refusal, such as retaliation and firing. In addition, a company cannot decline somebody’s job hiring simply because he or she doesn’t provide the aforementioned social media information.

Social media privacy laws protect employees from employers who forcefully require them to give up the login details to their personal social media profiles; but some laws have exceptions. (Image: josephineac (CC) via Flickr)

An employee can then use this law to justify a right to sue the violating employer, and in this kind of infringement fines will be provided for by as much as 500 dollars per violation.

Similar statutes can be found in more than 12 states across the U.S., including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland and California. The existence of these laws were born out of several reports that many employers are getting to be too insistent when it comes to making employees and job seekers give out their log in credentials to social networking site accounts.

For example, the incident that prompted Michigan to pass a social media privacy law involved that of certain elementary school officials and a teacher aide. The aide was fired because of her refusal to let officials access her Facebook account. A parent was complaining that the aide posted an unbecoming picture of her on Facebook.

Exceptions to the Rule

On the other hand, several companies are concerned and looking for exemptions. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, hopes that the state laws would allow Wall Street dealers and brokers to check out their employees’ social media conversations, but only those that are non-personal. This is because they just want to be sure that the stock brokers aren’t violating any policies when they converse about stocks on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networking sites.

Utah’s new social media privacy law allows companies to view log in details of their employees, but only if the service or account was provided by the company in the first place. In the same manner, an employee is compelled to share the login details of a social media account that is used for the business of the employer.

Furthermore, if an employer has sufficient proof that an employee is using a personal social media account to disperse or store company data, then some laws, like that of Utah’s allow these employers to obtain the login information of that employee.

Companies are better off now knowing their employee’s Social Media Pass

An employee’s account may have details regarding his or her race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or other aspects that can’t be used by employers when they want to hire somebody.

In this case, an employer can be faced with various federal and state anti-discrimination accusations if this results in employee termination or when a hiring offer is later declined. Employees won’t have to face charges on these kinds of violations if they don’t ask for social media account log in details from employees.

Generally speaking, companies should constantly review their policies regarding social media, because this medium of social interaction, using highly available and accessible publishing techniques, is constantly and frequently changing.

Social Media Privacy Policies Protect Employees’ Private Accounts Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

Apple has announced that its App Store has surpassed 50 billion downloads.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Apple said “We just hit 50 billion app downloads. Thank you. It couldn’t have happened without you. #50BillionApps” along with a link to the App Store.

We just hit 50 billion app downloads. Thank you. It couldn’t have happened without you. #50BillionApps tw.appstore.com/hgE

— App Store(@AppStore) May 15, 2013

Along with the milestone, one lucky person has just won a $10,000 App Store gift card. That person downloaded the 50 billionth app.

Furthermore, the 50 people who downloaded applications right after him or her all received $500 gift cards.

Nonetheless, the identities of people who won have not yet been revealed. Apple said that it will make an announcement soon.

Apple’s last big contest connected to an App Store milestone was last year when the App Store was nearing 25 billion downloads.

Apple began counting down to 50 billion last month by displaying a counter on the App Store home page along with various examples of how big 50 billion is.

Apple App Store Passes 50 Billion Downloads Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media