One of the greatest appeals of external/public social media is the status update stream. I worked with one company that developed social business apps and used its own Twitter-like status update product internally. Most of the employees were engineers, many working remotely. This application gave them back a couple of things lost in a remote working situation.

First, they could freely discuss amongst 10 or 20 people the solution to a coding problem. Someone could post that they were having trouble with a certain function, and the team could discuss it and come to a solution very quickly. (Much more quickly than they could have with a conference call.)

The other thing it enabled was a sense of team, and community. People could comment on the news, share jokes, make social arrangements, all without interrupting their work.

The thing about enterprise risk is, that in some ways, social media amplifies risk because it creates a permanent record, is easy to pass along, and because people sometimes forget who they are talking to. But the risk is exaggerated. Most companies have Standards of Business Conduct that cover things like disclosure of proprietary information, financial information safeguards and compliance, fair competitive practice and so on. These apply on a social network or at Starbucks. The key is to hire smart people and give them the appropriate training in their domain and in the right way to use any social media.

Everloop, which bills itself as an e-learning social network, claims “All tweens are left out of the social graph because they must be over 13 in order to legally use services such as Facebook. Without having a centralized online community of their own, a tween’s social media experience is disparate, confusing, unmanageable and filled with risk”

Excuse me? What about the child whose parents have the good sense to keep them off of social networks until they are old enough? Where’s the confusion and risk there? The risk comes when kids are pushed to grow up too soon by playing in a grown-up world.

Unless of course you are concerned that a lack of a social graph will hold your child back.

Tags: Everloop, i-safe, tweens, e-learning, social graph

Yesterday, in a failed attempt to make light of the current protests in Egypt to promote its products in a humorous way, Kenneth Cole tweeted:

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC”

The reactions on Twitter and Facebook were immediate and unforgiving. Lesson #1: The same effect that gets a positive message out so quickly via the popular social networks serves to accelerate and compound a negative message, but even more so. And Cole is so well versed in the use of Twitter he used the #Cairo hashtag to ensure that the company was embarrassed even more efficiently.

A friend of mine wondered why Kenneth Cole (the company) didn’t have training and policies in place to prevent such a gaffe. I think the answer is Lesson #2: CEOs and other senior executives, like Kenneth Cole the CEO, sometimes don’t take the training or don’t read the memo.

Lesson #3: Everyone who uses your social media credentials, speaks on behalf of the company. Kenneth Cole’s Twitter profile indicates tweets followed by -KC, like the Egypt tweet, are Cole’s which is commendable for its disclosure but fails to recognize that the CEO’s tweets, in a legal sense and in a brand-related sense, are still the voice of the company.

Lesson #4: When the s**t hits the fan, apologize immediately, accepting full responsibility for your mistake. Remember BP’s Tony Hayward saying “I would like my life back”? Nothing could have made his situation worse.

Within about an hour, Cole deleted the offending tweet and apologized on Twitter and Facebook. It’s hard to fault Cole and the company for their swift response. Note some of the “responses” on the Facebook page which cannot be reproduced here.

Lesson #5: People online, your customers and business partners included, often lack civility and will respond dramatically, or even viciously, when they feel you have made a mistake. Two sub-lessons here: a) Your error will be multiplied in its impact by the trail of online wreckage it creates with comments, blog posts, tweets and status updates, many of which will become part of the web’s permanent archive. b) Don’t make mistakes.

This is a great social media public relations case study in that the whole thing happened in about an hour, yet it clearly demonstrated how complex social media marketing is, how easy it is to make a mistake, and how quickly damage can spread.

There isn’t much else Kenneth Cole could have done in the first hour. Now that the dust is dying down, the company should make a financial contribution to relief efforts in the region, and develop some compelling messages in support of human rights for Egyptians.

Tags: Egypt, Kenneth Cole, Twitter, Facebook, public relations, social media marketing, British Petroleum, Tony Hayward

A few weeks ago, before New Years, Time magazine announced that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was its 2010 Person of the Year. Many thought the recognition was a year or two behind the curve. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was a runner-up in the magazine’s ratings. Too bad Time went with Zuckerberg and missed the chance to be right on top of 2010’s hottest stories* by putting Assange on its cover. Given the climate, it might have been an unwise business move.

On February 1, a piece in USA Today announced Social media users grapple with information overload. This alone does not seem to me breaking news or feature-worthy. The story is more about the rise in social media overload and its effects on businesses and their use of social media, but that’s too complex to fit in the space of a headline. Jon Swartz deserves full credit for being totally current on popular social networks (he mentions Quora but not Jaiku), and terminology, so this piece is informative for some. The piece even hints (to me) at a discussion of net neutrality, quoting AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse:

“Consumers don’t have bandwidth to process so many fragmented convos online and, often, at once. The industry needs to address it.”

This is in fact a staggering admission. While many people think business use of social media is still in its infancy, here’s an executive who says the medium is already too crowded and posing a problem for marketers.

So what is it that has the mainstream media sometimes a bit out of sync with the online world? Are senior editors too timid to give mainstream coverage to social media stories for fear they are “falling” for ephemeral fads? Conspiracy theorists might say traditional outlets are reluctant to give credibility to their competitors in the social world, but I don’t believe that.

Short of hiring me, what can the mainstream/traditional media do to bridge the gap between the current state of social media and the safe kinds of stories they are willing to publish?

I predicted last December a feature-length WikiLeaks movie would come out by the end of this year. If you’d like to wager on this, email me.

Tags: Time magazine, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year, Julian Assange, AOL, WikiLeaks, social media overload, Jon Swartz, USA Today, Quora