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Twitter for Rookies

Still not certain whether you should take the Twitter plunge? Or do you consider yourself a Twitter Rookie? The best way to determine its value is to give it a try. Focus on using Twitter professionally rather than personally – including staying current with local, national, and global news. This post offers simple best practice suggestions for setting up your profile and getting started as part of eCornell’s Tech Tuesday series from The Denovati Group.

First: Why Use Twitter Professionally at All?

As far as I’m concerned, every professional can benefit from having a Twitter account. That doesn’t mean we all have to care what people are having for lunch, who the mayor of the local Home Depot is, or what celebrities are doing, thinking, or selling. It also doesn’t mean that we have to share (or overshare) the banalities of our own lives, amass hundreds or thousands of followers, or strive for a high Klout score.

Contrary to popular perception, media hype, and the passionate proclamations of early-adopters and Twitter mavens, Twitter views itself as an “information network” rather than a “social network.” Specifically, as described on the About Twitter page,

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. Simply find the accounts you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

This description directly addresses the first item in my Twitter Worst Practices post: namely, the insidious and somewhat tyrannical assumption that all Twitter users must tweet. Reluctance to talk or share via Twitter is one of the primary reasons many later adopters are still hesitant to sign up. The reality is that Twitter is an incredibly powerful listening channel. It offers fantastic opportunities for everyone – especially busy professionals – to receive and screen a high volume of news, information and resources efficiently and effectively. It is perfectly appropriate to open a Twitter account with the intent to just listen. You never have to send a single tweet. Twitter even says so themselves:

You don’t have to build a web page to surf the web, and you don’t have to tweet to enjoy Twitter. Whether you tweet 100 times a day or never, you still have access to the voices and information surrounding all that interests you. You can contribute, or just listen in and retrieve up-to-the-second information. Visit fly.twitter.com to learn more about what’s yours to discover.

 

Best Practice Suggestions

Here are my best practice suggestions for setting up your profile and getting started. To keep things simple, I am going to focus on using Twitter professionally rather than personally, including staying current with local, national, and global news.

Choosing a Username (i.e., Your Handle)

  • Keep it short – 10 characters or fewer
  • Devise something that connects to your personal and/or professional identity, but be careful not to infringe on someone else’s brand
  • Make sure it won’t embarrass you, your colleagues, or your organization (i.e., no cutesy names or nicknames, no off-color humor)
  • Think about how the handle will read/sound to others, particularly when it’s viewed in all lower-case letters

Including a Picture (yes, you should have one)

  • You don’t need to restrict yourself to a headshot, but you should choose an image that accurately and appropriately reflects your professional identity
  • Make sure you have the right to use the image
  • Pick something that is both clear and attractive in a thumbnail version

Adding Your Name, Website, & Bio

  • Name: Use your real name
  • Website: If you don’t have a website to link to, link to your LinkedIn profile
  • Bio: Since you only have 160 characters, it’s okay to use key words in creating your bio rather than trying to craft a sentence. Remember to focus on your professional identity rather than your personal identity. It’s okay to include some relevant personal information, but be careful about including things that could be misperceived or might undermine your professional brand. If you have a LI headline/tagline you like, and it fits, by all means include it here.

Setting Up Mobile Access: Because tweets are like headlines, they’re extremely easy to digest and manage in small bites. That makes them perfect for what I call “interstitial time” – e.g., when you’re commuting or traveling, while waiting for someone, before you’re ready to get out of bed in the morning. To facilitate that, make sure you set your account up to send your tweets to your phone (i.e., via 40404) and/or download one of the Twitter apps to your phone and/or tablet.

Following Others

  • Accounts to target
    • Local, national, and international news sources
    • Professional and industry associations
    • Academic and research institutions, including your alma mater(s)
    • Your own organization, clients, prospects, competitors
    • Organizations you’d like to work for
    • Bloggers and thought leaders
  • Tips
    • Make sure you’re following official accounts
    • Get ideas from checking out the accounts followed by others and/or those recommended by Twitter
    • Review an account’s activity before deciding whether it’s a valuable source for you
    • If the volume of activity becomes overwhelming, find a way to dial things down by unfollowing some of the noisier and/or less valuable accounts

Restricting Followers: Assuming you don’t plan to start tweeting initially, you should make your account private by selecting the “Protect my Tweets” option. This way, no one will be able to follow you without your permission. Doing so will not affect your ability to follow others.

Building Twitter into your Schedule

  • Tune in at least once a day, for 5-15 minutes
  • Scan headlines and either follow the links to items that pique your interest or forward them to yourself via email to read later

Learning the Language and Basic Conventions

  • The best way to learn is to immerse yourself in the Twitter stream and glean meaning from the activity itself
  • Here’s a simple set of Twitter symbols and terms to get you started:
    • @ is used in front of a Twitter handle to directly reference an account; it also creates a hyperlink to their account
    • #, aka a hashtag, is a way of collecting tweets around a specific topic or theme; it also creates a hyperlink to a page of tweets that include the hashtag
    • RT = retweet (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet)
    • MT = modified tweet (i.e., resharing someone’s tweet after modifying the text)
    • FF = Follow Friday, a way of recommending specific accounts to follow (fading practice)
  • You can also identify typical Twitter conventions by watching the activity of others, but don’t assume it’s all good – best practices are constantly evolving
  • If you see something you’re not sure about, check out the Twitter Glossary or the Twitter Basics section of the Help Center to learn more

Click here to view the original post on the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) website and access related resources.

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The ABCs of Creating an Effective Social Media Policy

In most cases, companies create new social media policies to fix recent problems. All too often, the process looks like the following: An inappropriate employee action is discovered by management who immediately requests either HR or the Legal Department to craft a new policy dealing with the issue. A collection of “official experts” is quickly thrown together and sits down to write what they consider to be an appropriate response to the past infraction. This new policy is then hastily communicated to employees via email or the organizational intranet. And the entire process is repeated once the next new infraction occurs. As you can see, this procedure is far from effective causing employees to both ignore and in some cases, completely disregard critical safeguards you’re trying to put in place.

To develop a social media policy that is well-received by employees and capable of accomplishing the company’s goals, organizations should utilize a simple procedural framework. Just think “A-B-C.”

A – Assemble your team

The first step in creating a successful social media policy is to assemble a team of people who will be responsible for drafting the regulations. This team should be composed of professionals who hold positions of executive authority within the organizations, as well as non-executives who bring specialized knowledge or expertise to the table. For example, an entry-level employee with an advanced degree in data security would be an asset to this team even though he doesn’t work in management.

After you have assembled the team, you must evaluate your organization’s current position with regard to social media. One of the easiest ways to do this is by surveying your team members. Ask them about their knowledge of any state or federal laws that affect employees’ use of social media. You should also ask them what they know about employees’ current use of social media platforms. To obtain more in-depth knowledge, distribute confidential questionnaires to all employees.

B- Baseline the process and garner support

Analyze the data you obtained through your surveys and discussion to determine your organization’s baseline of policy awareness and social media use. Next, garner support from the people who will play key roles in the development of your new policy. Assign specific tasks to each member of your team, and reach out to anyone outside the team who will need to approve your new policy after it is complete.

C- Create and communicate

Use the information you have gained and the expertise of your team’s members to develop a social media policy that works for your company and communicate this policy to the rest of the organization. Not every social media policy will be the same. However, it’s generally wise to include a few basic principles. For example, when designating who should release social media posts on behalf of your company, be extremely specific. Employees should understand exactly who will speak on social media, when they will speak and what they will say.

Finally, you must communicate your new social media policies to employees. This requires more effort than simply distributing electronic copies of the policy. Take some time to discuss the policies with employees to be sure that they understand them completely. As time goes on, revisit your policies when you need to and update them as needed.

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Smart Social Media Policy Starts With Managers: 5 Key Questions to Ask

With social media, what you don’t know can seriously hurt your organization. One 2010 survey found that employees estimate spending roughly four hours every day checking multiple email accounts, with up to two hours spent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. A 2012 Salary.com survey found that 64 percent of employees visit non-work related websites daily. And don’t think blocking employee access to social media on company networks is the answer; personal smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, and easily fill the gap.

The rub for today’s organizations is that while social media use at work has definite risks, it also is one of the best ways to empower and engage employees. Increasingly, in our connected 24/7 businesses, the line between work and personal time is blurring. This is especially true for Generation Y employees; as long as they meet deadlines and deliver, these employees don’t feel that it’s particularly useful to distinguish between time spent updating Twitter or engaged in team meetings. Organizations may beg to differ, especially when an offensive or inappropriate blog post or tweet can damage their brand, lower employee morale, and even lead to workplace lawsuits.

Yet, most organizations don’t really know how their employees are using social media, either personally or professionally, let alone what impact it’s having on employees’ overall levels of productivity.

That’s why it’s so important, before you set policy, to know how your managers currently handle social media use at work, as well as how its use by employees is effecting their management. Get at these fundamental issues by asking managers five key questions:

  1. Have your employees’ use of social media ever triggered a workplace lawsuit or regulatory investigation?
  2. What impact have your employees’ personal use of social media during work hours had, if any, on their productivity?
  3. How do you use social media, if at all, to help manage your projects and employees?
  4. Have you reviewed all applicable federal and state laws governing electronic data content, usage, monitoring, privacy, e-discovery, data encryption, business records and other legal issues in all jurisdictions in which you operate, have employees or serve customers?
  5. Could you comply with a court-ordered “social media audit”, by producing legally compliant business blog posts, email messages, text messages and other electronically stored information (ESI) within 990 days?

Social media can speed innovation and collaboration, but ONLY if your employees know how to both use it as well as steer clear of its many pitfalls. Start by asking managers these simple questions; they often surface extremely important information that, especially in larger organizations, you may not have been aware of. Finally, remember that for reasons of both confidentiality and fear, getting access to this sort of information is not always easy. It’s therefore important that organizations create mechanisms by which examples of social media use (and abuse!) can be regularly shared with the broader employee base.

Guest Post on Women of HR

 

By Steve Miranda

Steve Miranda is Managing Director of Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), a leading partnership between industry and academia devoted to the field of global human resource management. He is also a faculty author of the new eCornell certificate program,Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice. Prior to CAHRS, Miranda was Chief Human Resource and Strategic Planning Officer for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest professional HR association, serving over 260,000 members in over 100 countries.

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Smart Social Media Policy Starts with Manager: 5 Key Questions to Ask

With social media, what you don’t know can seriously hurt your organization. One 2010 survey found that employees estimate spending roughly four hours every day checking multiple email accounts, with up to two hours spent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. A 2012 Salary.com survey found that 64 percent of employees visit non-work related websites daily. And don’t think blocking employee access to social media on company networks is the answer; personal smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, and easily fill the gap.

The dilemma for today’s organizations is that while social media use at work has definite risks, it also is one of the best ways to empower and engage employees. Increasingly, in our connected 24/7 businesses, the line between work and personal time is blurring. This is especially true for Generation Y employees; as long as they meet deadlines and deliver, these employees feel that it’s not particularly useful to distinguish between time spent updating Twitter or engaged in team meetings. Organizations may beg to differ, especially when an offensive or inappropriate blog post or tweet can damage their brand, lower employee morale, and even lead to workplace lawsuits.

Yet, most organizations don’t really know how their employees are using social media, either personally or professionally, let alone what impact it’s having on employees’ overall levels of productivity.

That’s why, before you set policy, it’s important to know how your individual contributors currently leverage social media use at work, as well as how its use is handled by theirmanagers. Get to the heart of these fundamental issues by asking managers five key questions:

  1. Have your employees’ use of social media ever triggered a workplace lawsuit or regulatory investigation?
  2. What impact has your employees’ personal use of social media during work hours had on their productivity, if any?
  3. How do you use social media to help manage your projects and employees?
  4. Has someone helped you and your employees review all applicable federal and state laws governing electronic data content, usage, monitoring, privacy, e-discovery, data encryption, and business record retention? What about updating you on other legal issues in the various jurisdictions in which you operate, have employees or serve customers?
  5. Could you comply with a court-ordered “social media audit?” That is, could you produce legally compliant business blog posts, email messages, text messages and other Electronically Stored Information (ESI) within 99 days?

Social media can speed innovation and collaboration, but ONLY if your employees know how to fully leverage it as well as steer clear of its many pitfalls. Start by asking managers these five simple questions. They often surface extremely important information that, especially in larger organizations, you may not have been aware of. Finally, even if your employees have been using social media without incident for some time now, it’s still a very good idea to fully educate them. As the old proverb goes, “No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn around!”

Tags:  Social Media, social media policy, HR Policies

 Guest Post on We Know Next

By Steve Miranda

Steve Miranda is Managing Director for Cornell University’s Center for Advanced HR Studies (CAHRS) as well as the Founder and President of “Four Forces Consulting, LLC.” Prior to joining Cornell, Steve was the Chief HR Officer for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest professional HR association, serving over 260,000 members in over 125 countries. Before SHRM, Steve was a HR VP at Lucent Technologies (currently Alcatel-Lucent). At Lucent, Steve spent 3-1/2 years in Hong Kong providing HR leadership for Lucent’s 14,000 person Asia-Pacific business. He also led the development of HR strategies for Bell Laboratories, the world famous R&D engine that has generated seven Nobel Prizes over the past 70 years. 

Steve currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) and the Council for Adult Experiential Leaning (CAEL). He is also advisor to three different start-up organizations as well as a past United States representative to the North American HR Management Association (NAHRMA). His team’s work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the BBC and many others. Steve has presented at multiple events worldwide, including the American Chamber of Commerce, The Chinese Ministry of Personnel Development and the National Institute for Health. He is a well know HR executive in the Washington DC area and a highly respected member of the Human Resources profession. He also teaches at the graduate level as an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Georgetown University and the Sasin business school of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

“Steve is the author of eCornell’s new online course Designing and Implementing Effective Social Media Policies. The course is one of three that make up the Certificate in Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice, offered in partnership with the ILR School at Cornell University.”

Steve holds an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts and a Masters degree in Computer Science (both Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Detroit.

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Dressing for Success in Cyberspace: Giving Yourself a Digital Makeover

You pride yourself on your professional appearance and demeanor. You strive to create and maintain a strong identity and reputation within your organization, with your clients and peers, and in your industry. But are you as diligent a custodian of your professional brand in cyberspace as you are in the physical world? If not, you probably need a digital makeover. This post provides guidance for critiquing, updating, and maintaining your digital presence to convey a positive professional identity in cyberspace throughout your career.

Step 1: Review and Critique

Conduct internet searches on yourself.

  • What to do:
    • Conduct searches via major search engines like Google and Bing.
    • Use different combinations of your name and aspects of your professional identity (e.g., organizations you’ve worked for, positions you’ve held, industries you’ve worked in), as well as nicknames you may have used when engaging in digital activity (e.g., sharing or liking an article, commenting on a blog post). It’s also a good idea to include a spouse/partner’s name and to search on particular aspects of your personal life (e.g., political donations, church affiliations).
  • What to look for:
    • Publicly available information and activity that you thought was private
    • References to and/or information about you shared by others
    • Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content
    • Personal activities, affiliations, and perspectives that may impact your professional life (rightly or wrongly)
    • Potential cases of mistaken identity

Evaluate your public profile on social media platforms.

  • What to do:
    • Find and review your public profile on networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus to see how your profile appears to people to whom you’re not connected.
    • If you have a Twitter account, a blog, and/or an account/channel on public platforms like YouTube, SlideShare, Box.net, VisualCV , Quora, Klout (it’s a potentially long list!), access your public profile on that account. Don’t forget to look at accounts you don’t use anymore too!
  • What to look for:
    • Content that is incomplete, out of date, and/or inaccurate
    • Typos and grammatical errors
    • Broken links
    • Potentially embarrassing or misunderstood images and/or content,as well as those that could undermine your professional brand
    • Publicly-displayed information that you’d like to keep private

Get someone else to critique specific accounts/activity.

  • Whom to ask: Identify someone you trust to give you an honest opinion, even if that opinion might make you a bit uncomfortable or hurt your feelings. Finding someone with whom you could do a quid pro quo exchange is not only mutually beneficial, but you’re likely to get a better sense of what you should/shouldn’t do based on your review of their accounts/activity in addition to their feedback on yours.
  • What to do: Identify the platforms/activity you want them to concentrate on. For most people that would be LinkedIn and Facebook. People who are more digitally engaged may also want to include platforms like Google Plus, Twitter and blogs.
  • What to look for: Basically they’re going to look for the same things you did in the previous step, only they can be more objective and are likely to spot things you miss. They can also better identify things that might be viewed as questionable by people who don’t know you.

Step 2: MakeOver

Delete risky content when/where you can.

  • If it’s something you can control (e.g., a blog comment made via Disqus or using your Twitter account, or a photo you uploaded to Facebook), access the content and delete it.
  • If it’s not something you can control (e.g., a Flickr photo in which you’re tagged, or a reference to you in a blog post), contact the person who created the content and ask them to either remove the content or unlink it from your identity.
  • In some cases (e.g., reports on contributions to political candidates, newsletter articles) you won’t be able to delete the content or unlink it from your identity, but at least you’ll be aware of what is publicly available and can be prepared to discuss it if necessary.

Board up digital properties you no longer use.

  • If you don’t plan to ever use a specific platform again, shut down your account. Check with the provider to see if your public data will still be available, or if it effectively disappears from cyberspace. If you can’t completely erase it, try to add information that redirects people to a new platform/account.
  • If you think you may use the platform again, clean up your account and add some kind of a “we’ll be back” sign. You may also want to redirect folks to a new platform/account.

Lock the doors that need to be locked.

  • If you don’t want everyone to see certain Facebook albums or wall posts, change the settings on those items. Do the same with activity you consider private on other platforms like blogs, Flickr, and YouTube.
  • Similarly, you may want to cull through your friends, connections, and followers on various platforms and disconnect from people with whom you don’t want to be connected/engaged on that platform (e.g., unfriending work colleagues and/or people you don’t know very well).

Make sure your front porches are presentable. Update your public profiles to address all the problems you identified during your review.

Direct people to the “right” you, and make yourself easy to find. Designate a hub or home base for your digital identity (e.g., your LI profile or a website). Make sure that hub includes current contact information (i.e., email address and/or phone number) and links to all your relevant digital presences.

Step 3: Maintenance

Think before you tweet, comment, update, blog, etc. The best way to manage a strong positive digital reputation is to not put anything out there that you will later regret. And the best way to do that is to be mindful of what you share and where you share it, to choose words and images carefully, and to remember that even though most digital activity is fleeting, it’s also permanent.

Set up internet search alerts at regular intervals. Using an engine like Google, set up regular alerts using the same criteria you used in your initial review.  This way, you’ll be notified whenever some cyber activity is connected to your identity. Keep in mind, though, that these automatic searches aren’t perfect, so you should plan to supplement them with periodic manual searches.

Keep a current inventory of your digital properties. Create a list of all the places you have accounts and update it whenever you join a new platform. This list may not be necessary for the accounts you use all the time, but it is vital in helping you remember the accounts you set up but never return to or stop using. It’s amazing how many digital stakes you can put in the ground and then forget about…

Review and clean up your digital inventory periodically. At least once a year, determine whether you want to continue to maintain specific accounts, especially those you rarely/never use. Doing so will minimize the digital detritus you leave behind.

Review and update your public profiles. Even if your professional circumstances haven’t changed, it’s worthwhile to take a look at your public profiles at least once a year to make sure you continue to be satisfied with how you’re presenting yourself in cyberspace – and to take appropriate action when you’re not.

Choose your friends wisely. We all have different rules about whom we connect with, but it behooves us all to be discriminating about the company we keep in cyberspace. Develop a set of connection rules and adhere to them consistently.

Click here to view the original post on the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) website and access related resources.

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CAHRS Top 10 for May 2013

Each month, the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) publishes this list of the top 10 resources and articles that we have found in the HR world. Read through and let me know if you find them useful or if you found other links we should take a look at in the comments section below.

1. Employee Engagement Can Vary Greatly by Industry and Employee Role

Summary: Cornell’s CAHRS ResearchLink reminds HR practitioners to stop worrying about benchmarking and determine key employee engagement components for specific organizations based on their unique business strategies and employee roles.

2. Health or Consequences

Summary: A recent Aon Hewitt survey finds many companies offering or planning to offer rewards — and consequences — for employee involvement in company health programs. Critics say this approach unfairly punishes some workers, but HR can play a key role in shaping employees’ perception of — and participation in — incentive-rich programs

Read more on this topic in the CAHRS Employee Health and Wellness Working Group Summary.

3. Another Generation Rises: Looking Beyond the Millennials

Summary: A new generation without an official moniker and relatively unknown to the larger corporate society of the United States is trudging through the American education system just like millions of others before them, and they are just starting to think about what they want to do with their lives.

Take a look at what Cornell’s MILR students shared in their research in the CAHRS webinar CSR: Implications for HR and Talent Engagement Webinar.

4. Creating the Best Workplace on Earth

Summary: Suppose you want to design the best company on earth to work for. What would it be like? For three years we’ve been investigating this question by asking hundreds of executives in surveys and in seminars all over the world to describe their ideal organization. But underlying the differences of circumstance, industry, and individual ambition we found six common imperatives. Together they describe an organization that operates at its fullest potential by allowing people to do their best work.

5. The “Sandwich Approach” Undermines Your Feedback

Summary: Have you ever used the “sandwich approach” to give negative feedback to your direct reports? You sandwich the negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. It’s a common method, but the sandwich approach may be undermining both your feedback and your relationships with your direct reports.

6. Innovation: An Integral Part of Talent Management

Summary: “HR plays a critical role in unleashing innovation in companies, and [it] is in the best position to create innovative corporate cultures, starting with the hiring process,” Carr said, noting that in the current talent management environment “we have a lot to be optimistic about, but we also have a lot of work ahead of us. Nowhere is this assessment more true, perhaps, than at PepsiCo, where developing a mobile recruiting strategy that meets job seekers’ needs and expectations has been a key priority and focus for the past three years

For more on Innovation, read the latest CAHRS ResearchLink on the Role of HR practices and Social Capital.

7. What’s the State of the Art in Performance Management?

Summary: This working group summary describes how companies are looking to better manage their performance management process, the connection of performance management tools to compensation decisions, employee development, and leader coaching.

8. Look Beyond Raises to Retain and Engage Talent

Summary: A recent study predicts salaries will rise sharply in emerging markets but remain flat in developed countries. This means finding other ways to keep workers motivated.

9. Workplace Violence: Why Every State Must Adopt a Comprehensive Workplace Violence Prevention Law

Summary: In 1972, Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster set out to determine whether people hold “stereotyped notions of the personality traits possessed by individuals of varying attractiveness.”[1] Their study provided participants with photographs of subjects previously classified as attractive, moderately attractive, or unattractive and asked them to record their impressions of each.[2] The results were astonishing.

10. Is HR at Its Breaking Point?

Summary: Some companies are choosing to do away with traditional HR departments and divvy up the duties to other departments, but not everyone agrees that’s such a good idea.

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Pat Harned’s Insights on Social Media at Work

Recently, the team at eCornell asked the Ethics Resource Center President, Pat Harned, for her insights on social media in the workplace. Dr. Harned has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our newest certificate Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice.

1. How does your organization, The Ethics Resource Center, use social media to interact with people online?

I think we’re like most organizations. Social networking is sort of the Wild Wild West and we, like everyone else, are trying to figure out how can we make use of social networks to reach the audiences that we want to try to reach with our message. So we have a Facebook page, and we make use of Twitter, LinkedIn, and other pages as they seem to be emerging and growing in popularity.

So far, what we’ve been doing is trying to post announcements about reports or new initiatives by our center. But I think for us the big challenge has been to try to figure out how we reach business leaders and other target audiences using social networks. It’s not always easy to figure out how to reach them.

2. You have recently completed a study of social media use in the workplace. Can you share any insights that you have learned from that study?

Our center recently did a survey of U.S. workers on their use of social networks from the workplace. We were interested in that topic because we wondered how much social networks are actually changing the way employees think about ethical conduct and how it changes their relationships to their supervisors. And we learned a couple of important things.

First, business leaders who think that having a policy that prohibits social networking are only confusing are lying to themselves about how much employees are actually online during the workday. The vast majority of employees are using social networks from the office whether or not their company actually prohibits it.

The second thing we learned is that the workplace is becoming a public square. Employees are willing to talk about both their supervisors and events in the news that involved their companies. More and more employees’ attitudes about what’s considered to be confidential is changing and social networks have a big role in that.

3. Younger employees are often social media-aware. Are older workers becoming active in this area?

I think it’s true that we all have the perception that social networking is something that has been a part of the millennial generation. What we just realized when we conducted a survey of employees across the country is that 73% of people who were using social networks from the workplace are over the age of thirty, and in fact, 71% of people who were using social networks from the workplace are in management positions. It’s not just a younger worker phenomenon anymore.

Pat Harned shares insights on social media at workPatricia Harned is the 6th president of the Ethics Resource Center. As president, Dr. Harned oversees ERC’s research agenda and leads its survey and benchmarking work for clients. She also directs ERC’s outreach efforts to policymakers and federal enforcement agencies in Washington, DC and advises CEOs and directors on effective ways to build an ethical culture and promote integrity in business activities.

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7 Simple Steps to Enhance Your LinkedIn Profile

A major part of representing your Human Resources department is having an accessible professional presence not only at your organization, but in cyberspace as well. One of the best ways to establish this presence is to have a respectable LinkedIn profile. If you haven’t spent much time on LinkedIn yet, the task of setting up and maintaining that profile may seem a bit daunting, especially if, like many professionals, your time is limited. Following the recommendations below will enable you to create a complete basic LinkedIn profile in addition to laying a solid foundation you can build on later. Depending on your starting point, you can tackle these to dos in as little as 1-2 hours.

Note: Before you get started, check to see if your employer has created guidelines for you to follow. Since they’re paying your salary and you’re representing their brand, they have a say in how you represent them and your role. 

#1: Set Your Profile to Public

Given the purpose of LinkedIn, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want their profile to be private or anonymous, but many people are still hesitant to let their presence be known. Here are three good reasons why you should opt for a public profile:

  1. If you have an externally-facing role and/or are a senior professional, people you may interact with will look for your profile to learn more about you.  As more and more people come to rely on LinkedIn as a resource, it will increasingly strike people as odd if they can’t find you. That’s not a good reflection on either your professional brand or your organization.
  2. With an anonymous profile, you are referred to in LinkedIn as “private private,” which can look really silly. It’s especially funny when someone with a private profile gets recommended by someone else. I’ve lost count of the number of notifications from my first-level connections that will say something like: Jane Doe has recommended private private: “I worked with Bob Smith at XYZ…” So much for anonymity!
  3. If people want to find your profile, they can. I can’t reveal the trick, but resourceful LinkedIn users know how to access profiles using people’s LinkedIn member numbers. It’s a very simple workaround.

#2: Add a Respectable Profile Picture

As in most social networks, there’s a normative expectation that people have a profile picture. If you don’t, people will either assume that you don’t know what you’re doing or that you have something to hide. Including a profile picture prevents the speculation and lets you control the initial impression people get when they view your profile.

Depending on their jobs, industries, and reputations, some people on LinkedIn can get away with more daring profile pictures. For most of us, however, a conservative approach is best. Here are some tips that will work for most people:

  • Use an image that reflects your professional identity, not your personal identity.
  • If you use a photo of yourself, make sure it’s current and of decent quality. Only include yourself in the photo and be sure the focus is on your face (i.e., a headshot).
  • If you don’t want to use a photo of yourself, find an image that reflects your values, capabilities or essence in some way. Be careful about using things that are too cutesy or may involve questionable humor.

#3: Include a Headline

To me, the LinkedIn headline is better in concept than in reality. Personally, I’ve always struggled with what to include, and I’ve never been completely satisfied with what I’ve come up with. But since it’s something of a “necessary evil,” you have to try to make the best of it. Here are a few suggestions based on my own experience and my review of hundreds (if not thousands) of profiles:

  • Short descriptors separated by bars are probably easier than trying to craft a sentence.
  • Focus on what you offer, not what you want (e.g., don’t say you’re looking for a job).
  • Avoid bland descriptions like “experienced accountant”.
  • Highlight your unique professional capabilities and/or character using key words that will catch people’s attention.
  • If you’re currently employed, it’s perfectly acceptable to include your current job title.

 #4: Provide a Robust Description for Your Current Job

Even if you don’t have time to fully flesh out your profile, you should at least provide a robust description of your current position. This is especially true for folks in externally-facing roles like recruiting, human resources, public relations, marketing, sales, and business development. You should also at least list all your previous employers/positions–certainly the most recent/relevant ones.

Generally speaking, the description you provide in your LinkedIn profile is the same as what you’d include on a resume. So if your resume is current, you should be able to just cut and paste titles and text from that document to the data entry boxes on LinkedIn. If your resume isn’t current, this is a great opportunity to update it!

Additional Job Description Tips:

  • Be sure to link the job to your employer’s Company Page. If they don’t have one, suggest they set one up – pronto!
  • Limit your description of the organization to 1-2 sentences. If people want to learn more, they can go to the Company Page.
  • Also limit your description of the job and your responsibilities as much as possible, focusing instead on unique contributions, value added, and accomplishments.
  • Remember that you’re writing for both search engines and human beings. That means your descriptions should be key word rich, but they also need to be attractive and readable by people.
  • When in doubt, leave it out. The profile should entice people to want to learn more rather than try to tell your whole life story. The less relevant a job is to your current professional activities, the less you should say about it.

If you have any professional certifications, be sure to list them in the Certifications section. Similarly, if they’re relevant to your current professional activities, you can also list honors and awards. Both sections can be completed in mere minutes.

#5: Include Your Education

As with some of your older work experiences, you can take a “name/rank/serial” number approach to providing information about your academic background. You should definitely list all the schools you attended and/or got degrees from, but you don’t need to provide more detail than your degree program and the years attended. And yes, I would include the years. If you don’t, people will naturally conclude that you’re trying to hide the fact that it was a long time ago, so not listing them doesn’t protect you from discrimination. Besides, if someone is going to discriminate against you based on your age, you probably don’t want to work with them anyway.

 #6: Don’t Include Personal Information

I don’t know why LinkedIn provides these fields, but I would recommend against including personal information such as your address, marital status, and date of birth. This information is generally not relevant to your professional identity or interactions.

#7: Enable People to Get in Touch with You

Related to the fear of having a public profile, many professionals seem to be afraid that if they don’t restrict access to themselves they will be inundated with and overwhelmed by a variety of requests. In my experience, the fear is greater than the reality. I recommend lowering the drawbridge and letting people contact you through every available LinkedIn channel. And if you’re in a job like business development or recruiting, you own your own business, or are on the job market, make it easy for people to get in touch with you outside of LinkedIn as well by adding a statement under your Contact Settings that shares your contact information. Here’s a sample statement:

I can be reached directly via email at name@organization.com, or via phone at 312-555-1212.

To make it easier to manage inappropriate requests, clearly specify the kinds of opportunities you’re open to hearing about.

 

This article was originally published by Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs).

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What you don’t know can hurt you: assessing your organisation’s social media use

With social media, what you don’t know can seriously hurt your organization. An offensive or inappropriate blog post, tweet or Facebook comment can damage your brand, lower employee morale, and even lead to workplace lawsuits. Yet, providing technology tools, such as social media, also is one way to empower and engage employees. Social media can speed innovation and collaboration, but only if your employees know how to use it within a well-defined framework.

For HR leaders, the critical first step in developing that framework is admitting they don’t know.

Simple questionnaires can surface extremely important information that, especially in larger organizations, you may not be aware of. Even smaller organizations have disconnects between departments. Big or small, these organisational “black holes” tend to happen around situations, like past litigation, where confidentiality is a big concern. In these cases, policy-relevant information often gets hidden from those who most need it. But by asking the right questions, you no longer have to fear “not knowing” and its potential risks.

For managers

To assess how managers handle social media in your organisation, you need to not only know how they’re managing its use, but also how its use by employees is affecting their management:

  • Are managers aware of all applicable laws, as well as legal issues, related to social media use and data privacy in the areas in which they do business or manage employees? — If managers don’t know what rules and regulations govern social media use at work, this leaves you, and them, open to litigation and fines.
  • Could they comply with either an internal or court-ordered “social media audit”? — Managers are already required to keep detailed records of hiring, disciplinary actions, purchases, or contractor selection for potential audits or investigations. Social media use at work is no exception, especially as electronic business records (EBR) are increasingly being entered as evidence in lawsuits.
  • Have their employees’ use of social media ever triggered a workplace lawsuit or regulatory investigation? — This is the type of information that tends to fall into those organisational “black holes.” Confidentiality concerns, especially for the plaintiff, often lead managers to hush up these situations; the truth, however, is essential in order for policies to prevent similar future problems.
  • Have their employees’ personal use of social media during work hours impacted productivity? — The answer to this question doesn’t necessarily signal that social media use at work is “good” or “bad;” it’s just another data point. For example, some top-performing employees may spend four hours each day updating Facebook and Twitter, while their less productive colleagues spend half that much time.

For employees

Getting honest responses from employees about their social media use at work is critical for accurately assessing your organisation’s baseline; don’t be afraid to ask because you may not like the answers. Conduct anonymous, unsigned, untracked surveys, and give employees multiple assurances that their responses won’t lead to disciplinary action or impact their job safety:

  • How familiar are employees with your company’s social media acceptable use policies, and have they ever received formal training on them? — If you already have a social media policy, answers to this question will tell you how good you’re doing communicating it throughout the organisation. If you have no policy, the answers give you hard numbers to bolster your case as to why social media policies and training are important, especially if social media is a significant part of your organisation’s revenue-generating practices.
  • Have they either intentionally or accidentally violated your organization’s social media policies? — If the answers you got to the first question reveal widespread lack of familiarity or knowledge of your social media policies, don’t be surprised by what employees tell you here. Conversely, if you communicate well and give all employees formal policy training, then answers here could surface serious cultural disconnects.
  • Do they know what an electronic business record is? — If not, employees also probably don’t know that EBRs are now used widely as evidence in legal and regulatory investigations. And again, what they don’t know can hurt you.
  • Do they use personal mobile devices for talking, texting, web surfing, social networking, blogging or emailing during work hours? — The answers are, most likely, ‘yes.’ But they give you a hard number to replace nebulous guesses. Once you know the current scope of employees’ social media use (by level, function and job type), you can start developing smarter guidelines for acceptable use.

Finally, make sure employees know that final survey results will be shared throughout the organisation, within a formal social media training program. This program is the culmination of your policy development efforts; let all stakeholders know the significant impact they’ve made just by answering a few simple questions.

Guest Post on HR Zone Blog

 

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Remote Work That Fits: The Best Types for Your Organization

In my last post, I discussed how organizations use remote work to drive business and human capital objectives — and the pitfalls of not defining these objectives before implementing remote work policies. The takeaway was clear: If you don’t know why you’re using remote work, it’ll be difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether these practices are adding value or falling short.

But organizations can’t stop there. The next step, once you’ve clearly defined your objectives for remote work, is to determine which types of remote work arrangements are best suited for the type of work that needs to get done, and the different employees who do it. To make these decisions, you first have to understand the wide array of working arrangements we call “remote work.”

Remote work: What’s in a name?

In general, we use terms like ‘virtual work’, ‘telecommuting’, and ‘remote work’ interchangeably to refer to employees working outside the office in some form. But remote work, similar to online or e-learning, is hardly one thing; rather, it comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. That said, we tend to see organizations using four basic types of remote work arrangements:

The home office

The first type of arrangement is home-based work, in which employees either work full- or part-time from a home office. This is the most common form of remote work in today’s organizations; in these cases, employees are generally working from home less than full-time, or a few days per week.

Flexible work schedules and job-sharing

The second type of arrangement involves flexible work schedules. These include a compressed work week, sharing a single job and hours with another employee, as well as temporary teleworking, where an employee works from home or some other location one day per week or per month. Flexible work scheduling is also quite common in many organizations.

Mobile work

A somewhat less common form of remote work is mobile work, in which employees work from the road, or as we often say, “out of their cars.” Mobile employees tend to make up a small percentage of remote workers in most organizations, but are more common in certain functional areas, like sales.

Onsite client-based remote work

Finally, there is onsite, client-based remote work. Here, employees are working at client or customer locations as integral members of a project team, to provide more intimate customer service, or perhaps to foster partnerships.

Forget one-size-fits-all

As you embark on your journey to implement successful remote work policies, it’s important to assess the different types of remote work and which of these best fit your organization. The answers are usually not one-size-fits-all; this flexibility is precisely one reason remote work can drive employee engagement. Start by reviewing the different types of remote work and how each supports (or undermines) your business and human capital objectives. Then, use the following questions to assess remote work arrangements from an individual employee and job function/design perspective:

  • Which types of remote work are best suited for different employee groups and levels in your organization?
  • Which types of remote work are best suited for different job functions and tasks in your organization?
  • Which types of remote work are best suited for different employee personality types?

For the uninitiated, these may seem like picky details. But successful HR leaders know that realizing the benefits of remote work requires due diligence. And in policy making, more specificity allows you to better tailor policies and practices, which in turn reduces the risk that some employees are burdened more than others. This perceived unfairness can quickly lead to disregard. Finally, having a clearer picture of which employees are using which remote work arrangements can help you make better resource decisions — about office space allocation, technology investments, or even parking lot size.