SociaLens

If your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business - such as a faked viral marketing campaign - is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm's reputation and ultimately to its bottom line. Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization's own sustainability and competitive advantage. It's worth noting here that I believe the word "integrity" is preferable to the expression "corporate social responsibility," as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do "good" in the world and be "good" citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that is absolutely true. But what's new - and what organizations need to focus on - is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

It's easy for early adopters and social media enthusiasts to get caught up in the latest and greatest tool available but many companies are still seeking a basic foundation. According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 12 percent of companies surveyed felt their organizations were using social media effectively.

Communication technologies that help people stay connected to the workplace are often seen as solutions to balancing work and family life. However, a new study in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests there may be a "dark side" to the use of these technologies for workers' health-and these effects seem to differ for women and men.

Surprisingly, a study of deception in e-mails versus phone calls found that people were more honest in e-mails because they can be documented, saved and aren't real-time communication scenarios, which is when most people drop white lies. Technology isn't the gateway to rampant deception; instead, Toma and Hancock both suspect that our distrust of communication technology is more likely rooted in our fear of it. "We've evolved as a species that talks face to face, and evolution is a slow process, and we're interacting in a new environment where our basic assumptions are undercut," Hancock said. So, in a way, it's natural to expect people to lie more online. "Every time a technology is new, it elicits great fears. Many people are fearful about what it's going to do," Toma said. "So I think fears about deception stem from this general fear of technology and certain features of technologies that make it easy to lie."

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.

The problem we see today is that many leaders cannot themselves count on a long-term strategy; they know direction will change, and they find it "de-energizing' that they can't help their employees provide one concrete, accurate answer to direction. What we have seen is that dialogue about direction on a more frequent basis, being honest and open about the unknown, is the best strategy. Leaders need to learn how to do this because frequent, ongoing dialogue about direction and redirection are not part of the traditional leadership training manual that taught 5-year strategy planning.

If you didn't hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he's already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen?  Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it's Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight?  Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.

The first-of-its-kind longitudinal study by civic learning scholars of high school students' Internet use and civic engagement found that: For many youth, their interest in the Internet translates into engagement with civic and political issues. Contrary to popular belief, it is rare for individuals on the Internet to only be exposed to political perspectives with which they agree, but many youth are not exposed to political perspectives at all. Teaching new media literacies such as credibility assessment is essential for 21stcentury citizenship.

When a large brand like Pepsi or Old Spice decides to use video, there are a lot of factors they have to consider: What message is their video expressing? How will it affect their customers? When should they release it for maximum impact? Small businesses have to contend with all those same issues, but with smaller staffs and less money. Despite the challenges, there is value in video for small businesses, even if you're a video greenhorn. We found four businesses that have had real world success thanks to video

Feedback from friends posted publicly on people's profiles also tend to be overwhelmingly positive, which can further boost self-esteem, said Hancock, who co-authored a paper published Feb. 24 in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking."Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves," Hancock said. "We're not saying that it's a deceptive version of self, but it's a positive one."It may be one of the reasons why Facebook has 500 million users, who spend more than 700 billion minutes per month communicating with their friends via photos, links and status updates."For many people, there's an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there's a psychological benefit of Facebook," Hancock said.

The more honesty and humility an employee may have, the higher their job performance, as rated by the employees' supervisor. That's the new finding from a Baylor University study that found the honesty-humility personality trait was a unique predictor of job performance.

Information Technology (IT) consultants experience less stress when they carry out assignments in a working environment that motivates them. It also helps IT consultants experience less stress if they are able to manage their own work and if the demands placed on them in their work are reasonable. This is revealed in a psychology thesis from Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Trying to prevent leaks by employees or to fight off hackers only helps so much. Powerful forces are pushing companies to become more transparent. Technology is turning the firm, long a safe box for information, into something more like a sieve, unable to contain all its data. Furthermore, transparency can bring huge benefits. "The end result will be more openness," predicts Bruce Schneier, a data-security guru. It may be useful to think of a computer network as being like a system of roads. Just like accidents, leaks are bound to happen and attempts to stop the traffic will fail, says Mr Schneier, the security expert. The best way to start reducing accidents may not be employing more technology but making sure that staff understand the rules of the road-and its dangers. Transferring files onto a home PC, for instance, can be a recipe for disaster. It may explain how health data have found their way onto file-sharing networks. If a member of the employee's family has joined such a network, the data can be replicated on many other computers.

A new study reports that employees at exercise-friendly workplaces get more total moderate-to-vigorous physical activity than do others - a sign that bosses might be able to influence the fitness of their workers.

The idea behind this conference is that individuals who feel their identities validated in public venues are better able to accept others' identities, and to analyze critically the social forces and experiences that have shaped their own. We would like to transform our campus into spaces for just this kind of critical exploration and sharing among students, staff, faculty, administrators, alumni, and emeriti of all backgrounds, majority and minority.

Rob Cottingham's take on the situation in Libya

One take on what trumps what in the Age of Digital Information.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles. This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The best managers know how to frame work as a problem that is a lot of work to complete and a small amount of work to check. Mediocre managers spend too much time checking and revising their employees' work, and begin to approach the cost of just doing it themselves. (The worst managers hire incompetent people.) Wolfram Alpha made me this cute Venn diagram of the sweet spot: Competent (C) and not Micromanaged (M). Teams led by good managers reside in the shaded area of the diagram.