Links For The Week: 7th December
Monday, December 8th, 2008Only four links this week:
Twitter/Brand Monitoring
Jesse Stay has an exclusive interview with the woman behind @BritneySpears on Twitter over on Louis Gray’s blog, and I found this to be a very, very interesting read. When you think about Twitter, you think about people in social media or tech people or people who live their lives online. Yet @BritneySpears has found some footing with an audience of more than 10,000 (maybe it isn’t even her audience, maybe it’s a wider audience than her usual), and the results look to be, for the most part, positive.
It just makes you think, if a female pop star with a tarnished image in the last few years can get on something like Twitter and begin to make small steps to getting back on the right track, what can your company do with it?
[I'm @uniquefrequency on Twitter, if you want to link up there]
Social Media In Businesses
More than 60% of companies are not ready to engage in social media - Surprise surprise? Not really, if you ask me.
if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries - they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.
If your company is one of those that blocks Facebook, all it does is signal an extreme lack of trust in your employees. And most of Gen Y aren’t going to take it (Minus the bankers. They’ll do anything for money)
Generation Y/Millennials/Digital Natives
Read Write Web tells us that Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments - There are statistics in this research, but here’s the bottom line:
This report definitely makes it clear that IT departments can either choose to adopt some of these technologies, or they will risk that a large number of their young employees will simply go rogue.
I’ve had a little bit of experience with this in the past and I can say with some certainty that whatever organisations think they’re blocking, they’re not. Whether I want my email forward to Gmail and IT won’t do it for me, or running Firefox from my USB stick because I can’t download Firefox, there are ways to get it done. Blocking IM and/or Facebook? Pretty much useless with the 3G iPhone. (not that I have one).
Just let it go and find more meaningful work for the IT department to do (like improving web analytics, for one).
Blogging
Bryan Person of Social Media Breakfast asks whether blog sidebars are useful. I think they are and I feel I could definitely utilise mine more efficiently. How do you use yours? What are the must haves for your blog sidebar?
That’s it for this week, do share links with me on Delicious.com (I’m uniquefrequency) or just leave them in the comments below!
Tags: 3g iphone, @britneyspears, @therealbritney, blog sidebars, brand monitoring, britney, britney spears, bryan person, businesses not ready to engage in social media, delicious, digital natives, facebook, firefox, generation y, gmail, is your business ready for social media, it departments, louis gray, millennials, social media breakfast, social media in business, twitter, uniquefrequency, usb stick
