New Comm Biz

Peter Shankman has a great story about an agency guy that tweets about his distaste for Memphis while visiting FedEx to do some social media training. Oops. He got busted big time.

People have a tendency to get comfortable social media. Too
comfortable. There’s no shortage of examples where people post
incriminating photo’s on their Facebook or MySpace pages.  This is a problem that’s only going to get worse.

Like many HPers, I first joined Yammer after they won TechCrunch50.
I was first excited about the product (and I think it has a lot of
potential) but for me I didn’t find much to post there that I wouldn’t
post on Twitter. I think it has potential for two reasons:

• Some employees like the idea of Twitter but don’t want something so much out in the open
• There are things you may want to say to employees that you wouldn’t say on Twitter

TechCruch reports that Yammer has just raised it’s first round of funding. Yammer Raises $5 Million For Workgroup Micro-Messaging
So other people obviously feel it has potential as well.  Yammer has a
nice business model. It’s free to any employee with a company email. If
you want to control this group, say exclude people who have left the
company since signing up, or brand your companies page, there’s a per
user fee. This is great for small businesses who want a company wide
back channel, this doesn’t make sense for large enterprise customers. I
haven’t checked recently but I’m sure that if they don’t know, at some
point they’ll offer enterprise licensing.

In last week’s core community group the issue of Yammer came up. (I’ve mentioned our core community group before and written about it on my HP blog.)
The question was basically “What do we do about this?” It’s a very
valid question. The Yammer community is kind of a HP community, but no
one at HP gave them permission. The concern is that employees will
treat this like an official HP communication channel. Or just get a
little too comfortable with it and start saying too much.

HP has an official policy in our standards of business conduct which
applies to all company communication, to paraphrase: you don’t share
privilaged information through non secure channels. This means you
don’t send email to the wrong people, you don’t talk about certain
things outside of work, etc.

I quickly made the point that Yammer is no different than Ning, Facebook groups, LinkedIn
groups or anyother employee group, of which there are many. Anyone
could star a group for employees and people do. The thing to remember
is that these are not official and secure channels.

We will see a time where someone screws this up. Hopefully not at HP
but someone at some company will. We’re not perfect. Just like people
say the wrong things in email and to the wrong reporter, people make
mistakes.

I’m proud to say that the group at HP didn’t freak out and didn’t
try and shut it down. Instead we decided to make sure that our business
conduct standards are emphasized and updated to explicitly include
social media platforms.

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