Group items tagged

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project fielded a nationally representative phone survey about the social and civic lives of SNS users and reported the findings in June 2011 in a report entitled "Social networking sites and our lives."1 During the phone survey, 269 of 877 original respondents who were Facebook users gave us permission to access data on their use of Facebook so that it could be matched with their survey responses. We partnered with Facebook to match individual responses from the survey with profile information and computer logs of how those same people used Facebook services over a one-month period in November 2010 that overlapped when the survey was in the field.

updated map of online communities

A community for online communities

A community for online communities

Billions of people use social media everyday, all over the world. Once you start using networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube often enough, you start to notice that people share similar (and often rather annoying) online media habits, and can be categorised into common personality types.

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page

Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time.\n\nEven so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

Businesses are learning that social networking, used properly, can be an effective business tool. Having your employees involved in the community can enhance the company's reputation and bring in more business - so long as it's done right. Thus many large firms, especially in the technology industry, are actually encouraging their employees to blog, tweet, and participate in forums and social sites on company time. Even so, you still need to exert some control over how these sites are used. You can't just give employees free rein and hope they'll all exercise common sense. And you can't, in all fairness, blame them for violating rules that don't officially exist. You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they're presenting themselves as representatives of the company.

The new head of British foreign intelligence recently demonstrated that anyone can suffer potentially embarrassing or damaging revelations through social networking activity - and even the most mundane and seemingly benign tweets and status updates can have far-reaching consequences. Deb Shinder explains why you should watch your step.