Do You Know When Your ‘Friends’ Are Fraudsters?

You have to hand it to fraudsters, they are nothing if not up to date with their technology and that includes social media. I was really intrigued to see the demonstration that Mark Johnson (author of Demystifying Communications Risk and Cyber Crime, Security and Digital Intellgence) is running at MIS’ Social Media Risk Conference on 22nd and 23rd May; billed as a ‘live social media experiment’ Mark will be soliciting new ‘friends’ using fake social media profiles.

The Social Brand Value of the World’s Biggest Brands

Social business is one of those ideas that hit the ground running and few are the organisations these days that aren’t devoting time and resources to social media. But how does this all translate into value? Niall Cook (Enterprise 2.0 and the forthcoming The Business Marketeer’s Guide to Social Media) posted the results of a research programme at the end of 2011 (The Social Brand Value of the World’s Biggest Brands) that ranks (and explains) the world’s largest businesses on the basis of their social value. The results in some cases are obvious, in others quite unexpected; the whole piece is well worth a read.

Interview with Gower Author MaryLee Sachs

Following on from her Keynote Address and Masterclass at the 2011 PRIA Conference - PR Directions, MaryLee Sachs, author of the Changing MO of the CMO, was interviewed by author of the PR Warrior Blog, Trevor Young.

In the interview they discuss subjects such as the convergence of reputation and brands, the impact social media and analytics are having within organizations, and how MaryLee’s book came to be. Watch the interview in full here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVtVEZb1ypE

MaryLee has over 25 years of integrated marketing experience in the international arena. Resident in the UK for 17 years before moving to New York nine years ago, she has worked with and advised many blue-chip organizations including P&G, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, American Express, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak and Motorola.

Her supporting website can be found at www.changingmo.com

Marketing these days is definitely a two-way street

Mary-Lee Sachs is facilitating a webinar hosted by the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) 3-4 pm EDT on July 14th on The Changing MO of the CMO. If you ever doubted the scale of the revolution that is taking in place in marketing and communications … and if you want to make sense of where it will take your organization, then do sign up for this free webinar. You can find more details of exactly what she will be covering on the PRSA website, along with the process for registering. MaryLee Sachs is author of Gower’s The Changing MO of the CMO, which is out this month.

Turin becomes the capital of communication

That may be stretching the truth slightly but, on the other hand, for the two days of Eurocomm 2011  (April 7th and 8th) it’s surely a fair claim to make? Mark Wright (Editor of The Gower Handbook of Internal Communication), who is chairing the event, drew my attention to the program which looks very good indeed.

Website accessibility, the legal issues

Website owners have a legal duty to make their sites accessible to disabled people. Alex Newson’s article for the Guild of Accessible Website Designers, outlines what this means in practice and highlights several cases where organizations have fallen foul of the law; including the case of the Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, which was fined $20,000 for discriminating against someone who was blind. Web masters – you have been warned! Alex Newson is co-author of Blogging and Other Social Media.

Social shared services – models for the new media

I like the neologism that Glenn Remoreras (author of the forthcoming Building a Brand for IT),  has created with his term: ‘social shared services’ - effectively, the application of social media to shared services. It seems like a very natural application of new media given that engagement, internal service and collaboration are fundamental to ensure the dynamism of any shared services operation. And Glenn offers some useful models for where and how social media can be adopted usefully.

How do your internal communications measure up?

There’s a very neat free survey on the Synopsis Communication website that provides you with the means of assessing how well your internal communications measure up. In many instances online surveys such as this are no more than a ‘bit of fun’; in this case, the questions are based on the Synopsis Internal Communications model, which has an impressive research base behind it. Of course,  if the survey encourages you to want to do more, then Bill Quirke’s (MD of Synopsis) book, Making the Connections, is available in paperback.

Author article is the best

Carlo Patetta Rotta, author of A Short Guide to Ethical Risk knows better than anyone that the continuous spreading of Internet and Internet-related services, such as blogs, forums, and social networks has had a great impact on the ethical responsibilities of internal auditors within organisations…so he wrote an article about it in the Institute of Internal Auditors magazine. Carlo received a letter on wednesday from the President of the IIA notifying him that the US IIA have awarded his article A Groundswell of Risk as being one of the best published in the magazine. After such a roaring response, we couldn’t let you miss out on seeing it.

The advice is “give the users something simple to try out”

I have just got back from the Simply Communicate summit on internal communications where the theme was using social media for employee engagement. There were some wonderful case histories of how to apply social media to your intranet  from the likes of Euan Semple, Richard Dennison from BT and Neil Atkinson from Unilever. One of the most interesting but, in some ways counterintuitive, messages common to them all was “don’t over-engineer your first social media applications. Give the users something simple to get them started and then develop and adjust what you are doing on the basis of their feedback and what they find most useful.”  I don’t know about you, but I find this advice from some of the leading practitioners very encouraging. We are developing our new intranet at Ashgate at the moment so I’ll feed this suggestion into the development team. (Euan Semple is one of the author contributors to the Gower Handbook of Internal Communication).