Legal Risk & Risk Mitigation

Today I am going to be talking about legal risk and risk mitigation within organizations that are implementing social media. As you may be away there are a lot of cases currently going through our court system here in Australia as well as in many other countries over seas where social media has become the central problem for these disputes. These matters can range simply from defamation of a person by naming them on your blog or attributing them in a bad way on a website right through to releasing confidential information by putting it on your facebook page or your personal blog.

More specifically though I would like to look into the legal risks that organizations as a whole face when implementing a social media system into there workplace. Also how are you able to mitigate these risks to ensure that you are entirely legally covered for anything and employee may decide to post on a social media site, whether that being while at work or at home.

Firstly today I will be introducing you to a company and how this company operates in order to demonstrate that if they were going to allow a social media system in there organization how they can control what happens within the work place. The organization that I will be going into today is McCraw Transport. McCraw Transport is a small family owned company that is split into three main sectors, these are the office staff who find loads to transport and file all the paper work, the mechanics who maintain and service the trucks and trailers, and finally there are the drivers who travel interstate transporting the goods. Some risks that social media implementation posses on this company is that if an employee was to be granted the use of social media tools at work, it could become unfair to other employees who would not be able to have that same access as there job needs them to be in a workshop or driving a truck all day where it would not be safe to be using these social tools. Furthermore there would be a blur on what social media contact would actually be used during paid work time and during break time for the drivers as they are constantly away from home and there employer where this can be monitored. 

The way that all of this legal liability can be avoided is to create a social media policy for the company where it has the same terms for all sectors of employment. an example of this is say that social media can be used within the premise during your break times and while out on the road social media can only be used during your designated or required stop times and not during hours in which you are being paid for. Furthermore to state what can be posted on social media sites about the company can help, that way an employee can’t argue they unknowingly posted damaging the company. And finally this company could state in there social media policy that failing to adhere to the policy they can risk termination of there contract in order to mitigate all potential legal damage to the company.

Risks & Benefits of Enterprise 2.0

There are many benefits and risks within implementing Enterprise 2.0 as it is bending the general conventions of how businesses and people operate. With this there are many successful implementation story along with those not so good ones. Today I am going to be telling you about some of the benefits and risks of implementing Enterprise 2.0 and how it has actually effected some people. So to start of with I will tell you about some the benefits that can be acquired by the use of these tools.

Firstly and I believe to be one of the most beneficial  function of Enterprise 2.0 is collaboration. Without collaborating with colleges while trying to complete a task that involves more the just you can be difficult when using conventional methods as there is no means in order to simultaneously share your work amongst other workers. Del Monte who is a food manufacturer and marketer of processed foods enhanced and sped up there whole release system on there food productions by using Microsoft Sharepoint in order to collaborate there teams so that a used by date can be established much faster so that the product can have a longer shelf life. 

The second benefit that I am going to be looking at today is the narrowing of target audiences. Through Enterprise 2.0 it has become possible to narrow your target audience but still being able to reach more people then aiming at a wider audience. The use of social media sites such as facbook and twitter has made this so easy by allowing you use tagging methods or grouping. By this, say a company that is selling beer and at the moment is using there shop front and road side boards in order to advertise there beer, but then use web 2.0 tools such as twitters hash tags and create a post selling there product with a hash tag of say #beerdrinkers they will be able to target anyone who in there profile states that they like to drink beer.

Now moving onto some risks of implementing enterprise 2.0 systems. Firstly one of the greatest risks of using these tools is just plain out that the people you are trying to target simply don’t use web 2.0 tools. For example it would be completely useless to say try and sell hearing aids to elderly people through blogs or twitter as they simply would not be using these sites. 

Furthermore the final risk that I am going to be talking about today is over using social tools. Although these tools are extremely helpful in getting to your target audience and highlighting there interests, if you use these tools too frequently you will be making yourself come across as annoying and overbearing as honestly who wants your facebook to feed to be filled up with the same company saying come check us out constantly. An example that i have seen of this happen is the Chalk Hotel in Brisbane where to begin with they started of using nearly no social media tools and then within a week they were using the internet and social media as there main form of marketing and contacting with there target audience. So yes you have to use these tools to progress anywhere but be warned there is a definitive limit on how much you can use these.

Web 2.0 Tools

Web 2.0 tools can be a great asset to almost any one as they can allow you to get out on the web more frequently and more importantly they can allow you to advertise your self to people from all over the world to get your name out there in the community. There are many of these tools that can be used to enhance your personal productivity, these range from wikis through to blogs and social media. Today I will be guiding you through a couple of these and how exactly you can use these to your advantage in order to use the internet in its most efficient way.

So firstly to start of with we will look at wikis. A wiki is a collaborative web page which a group of users edits in order to display and maintain a set of data. This can be extremely beneficial when working within a team environment as no two people have to be in the same place as the whole group can just all look at and collaborate all of there work via the wiki page. One of the most widely known wikis is of course Wikipedia. Although academically Wikipedia is frowned upon it can provide a great base source in order to gather relevant information on a topic. But in saying this as almost anyone is able to edit the information on these pages at times they can be quite inaccurate. 

The second tool that I will be talking about today is Twitter. Twitter is a social media site that allows its users to great a ‘microblog’ with posts under 140 characters. This tool can be incredibly powerful as it allows people to aim there post towards a specific audience by the use of there ‘hash tag’ function. Twitter can be detrimental toward the use of web 2.0 as it allows you to narrow the audience to the people that are actually after what you are posting. For example with my blog (the one you are reading now) I use twitter in order to advertise to the world that my blog is here and available for anyone to come along and find what they are looking for.

The Final Web 2.0 tool in that i will be looking at today is the use of blogs. A blog is one of the most powerful tool that you can use in order to enhance you personal productivity as it allows you to present your self to the world in exactly the way in which you want to be viewed. it also allows you to have a central hub as such in which you pass everything to so people can find you. An example of this is you maybe using your blog to keep people up to  date on the latest gadgets hitting the market, so you could create a link on your twitter and facebook accounts to your blog, you may also put your link on a wiki page saying that you are regularly updating on this information on your blog. 

So yes from this I believe that a blog is the utmost important web 2.0 tool that you could use to sharpen your web presence and most of all your productivity. Although without the other tools supporting it your blog will be completely invisible to everyone searching for it.