Posts Tagged ‘social’
En préparation de l’évènement Unethical web event qui prendra place le 15 Septembre 2001, Simon Gouth, marketing professionnel pour Redfront considère de quelle façon, les faux profiles créés en ligne on une répercussion qui ne ce limite pas seulement au fait de remplir la boite de courrier indésirables des utilisateurs.
What does it mean to be a social organisation versus one that uses social media? Too many Managing Directors think of social media as online tools that sit well and truly in the Communications Department. More often than not, those tools are handled by digital natives on their behalf, those people who have a familiarity with social media that senior management do not. This leaves a significant deficit of understanding at the heart of many management teams and at the core of brand and businesses strategies about how to really adapt to, and make the most of, social media.
Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google created an extremely rich and insightful presentation looking at the challenges that real-life social networks bring to web design.
When it comes to reflecting our real life social networks into what could be considered rudimentary online networks, there is a real design challenge in terms representing how your friends, colleagues and associates inter-relate to each other.
Social technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have a homogenised view of friendship; they group everyone together. This typically doesn’t reflect how real friendships are nurtured and naturally creates communication challenges.
For example, not everyone will want to know on a daily basis about your fondness of cats, or wants to know about your regular eating habits.
So next time before you tag your photo’s on Facebook, Flickr or send that Tweet consider who will actually see it and do they need to?
Ten years ago, a human resources manager would have had to hire a private investigators in order to find out what a potential future employee liked to get up to on Friday nights.
However, while Facebook has surely put paid to the careers of dozens of PIs, it may be doing the same to thousands of job-seekers who really have nothing to hide.
There are currently no regulations relating to the use of social sites in employee-profiling, and many employers say they have discounted an applicant based solely on what they saw of him or her online.
There is a distinct difference between the day-to-day lives of many social network users and what they post on their profiles. Is it fair that prospective employers use this to judge applicants, without any context or wider knowledge of the individual?
Alternatively, is the onus on each individual to ensure his or her online identity is not one that may send shivers down the spine of potential bosses?
In a world of ever-decreasing privacy, Jared Woods from SKM asks; how social is too social?
Jared has been working in employment communications for nearly ten years. His passion is helping companies differentiate themselves as workplaces, and use their corporate personality to attract, engage and retain the right kind of talent.
A dyed-in-the-wool technology junkie, Jared believes that when it is used to enhance communities, the result is a strong culture, effective management and commercial benefit.
Jared works for engineering consultancy Sinclair Knight Merz. He is a regular blogger and contributor on forums, events and online education programs.
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There is a lot of talk about how social media affects your employability, and how companies can address employee behaviour online.
Employers are using online searches with increasing regularity to profile candidates, and that can pose a huge risk to job seekers’ career prospects, and even their personal reputations.
A happy and safe middle ground between a healthy interest in the online presence of a potential employee, and delving to the point of being unethical needs to be found.
Here are a few thoughts about how both employers and job candidates can handle the realm between a person’s actual character and their drunken party photographs.
Employers
Employers have a choice. They can either use candidates’ social media presence to review them, or they can eschew it.
The most common and simple method is of course to search for an individual on Facebook. If a candidate’s privacy settings allow it, with one click a potential boss may suddenly find him or herself privy to their relationship status, whether they count their friends in dozens or thousands and what they got up to in Greece last spring.
There is even software – like MaxHire – which actually uncovers every instance your potential employee appears on the Internet, collating their information from a range of websites.
Whether or not you feel comfortable making use of technology in that way is purely subjective. However, just as an aside, 70 per cent of surveyed employers do.
Ethics dictate that you must notify your candidates that this is part of the equation, but currently, you are not legally bound to do so.
Everyone behaves differently under observation, and clandestine voyeurism is out of place in a formal process like hiring.
Some companies explain that they will be conducting a social media audit to see how strong a candidate’s personal online brand is, and whether or not it is in line with the organisation’s values.
Employers should be totally transparent about which specific platforms they will be checking, giving candidates the chance to scan their profiles on the same sites – be they LinkedIn, Twitter or any other – to make sure they have everything covered.
And now, on to the thorny issue of drunken party pictures posted on social media websites. People use social media to share experiences they enjoyed, and these can take any number of forms.
It is rare to find Facebook albums entitled ‘Me reading sensible books in my tracksuit on the couch on weeknights’.
The information people present on social networking sites is skewed towards the most exciting and social content in their lives.
It is vital that hiring managers and employers recognise this so that they can evaluate a person properly. Without context, most information online is at best a guide – it is by no means definitive.
At present, the only an employer’s use of information from social sites is limited only by the personal discretion of the hiring manager.
No official framework exists to regulate the way it is used, and self-published information is not protected in any way by the law.
Candidates
Unfortunately, there is not much choice for candidates but to self-censor their online interaction. A good rule of thumb may be to imagine the worst possible case scenario whenever you post something online.
This essentially means that personal freedom is restricted in what is theoretically a private space. However, the cold hard fact is that nothing is private once it goes online. If you are going to publish your life, be ready for people to use that information, out of context, and in the worst way they possibly can.
There are a few ways in which candidates can reduce their vulnerability to unwanted scrutiny when applying for jobs.
For example:
1. Using an email address that does not link you to online social profiles;
2. Supplying links to the ‘right’ online properties when applying – like LinkedIn, or a professional blog
3. Setting up Google alerts based on your own name, so that you can see how you appear to a casual observer
4. Checking privacy settings and adding disclaimers where possible to demarcate personal information from professional.
None of these methods are foolproof, but they do go a long way toward averting potential cases of mistaken identity and social media faux pas, and to separating professional personal from social personality.
To finish with some perhaps troubling figures, more than 75 per cent of companies surveyed in the US admit that they have scrapped a candidate based on data found on social networks, and more than 50 per cent of those admitted that the process of profiling candidates online was not explained in detail in the terms and conditions presented to applicants.
There is more reading on this topic from some very clever HR people here, here, here and here, and you are invited to share your experiences, thoughts and comments on the message board below.
Social media and food go together like strawberries and cream…
Well that’s how Bridget_Cooks and the media140 Foodies event see it this Wednesday 5th May at the Electrolux Centre in Sydney, Australia. media140 and SBS will present the ultimate social media food event which brings together Sydney’s gourmets, gourmands, chefs, food writers, bloggers, critics and restaurateurs.
The Internet Chef, Bridget Davis will prepare a variety of canapés as part of her renowned degustation, as our host for the evening Julie Posetti will discuss with Bridget Davis how she uses twitter and other social media in her work, together with interviews with well-known food writers including Lorraine Elliot from Not Quite Nigella and Franz Scheurer the founder of Australian Gourmet Pages.
“Accessibility to products, restaurants, chefs and food personalities has never been so easy with the social web. Whether you’re chatting with your favourite chef about what’s hot at the markets, sharing recipes with your friends or getting real-time recommendations for the best steak restaurant in town – it’s all only a mouse click away. The social web is certainly impacting the food industry,” said Ms Davis.
Guests will be able to enjoy sommelier-matched wines from Robert Oatley Vineyards with Bridget’s cuisine in another unique event created by the media140 Australia team.
Tickets have almost sold out but you might just be able to bag one at media140 Foodies. We kick of at 6.45pm for a 7.15pm start and will be live streaming and blogging from the event at http://www.media140.com/live.
But of course, why watch the live stream, when you could be enjoying the amazing food & wine at the event!
UPDATE 8th May 2010
SBS were kind enough to film highlights from the evening for media140.
On the 12th May we will be launching media140 Oxford, the first in a number of regional events into the UK bringing together many of the UK’s recognised professionals in digital and real-time social media.
Hosted in the Jam Factory which was the former premise of Frank Cooper’s Marmalade Factory, it is designed to promote the visual arts, providing a relaxed venue to enjoy the art exhibitions, classes, and events.
media140 Oxford will feature an impressive range of social media professionals, sharing their experiences about managing your personal and corporate brand online. How should you manage the reputation of your brand and yourself? How do campaigns enhance reputation? What should you do if something goes wrong? These and many more points will be addressed by a first-rate line-up.
Uniquely all of the speakers have a relationship to Oxford or Oxfordshire:
- Molly Flatt from Abingdon-based 1000Heads, who will talk about the human nature of brands.
- Eddy Lambert from Oxfam, covering recent social media activity from the charity to stir up support for the Robin Hood Tax, and how Oxfam uses digital media to campaign for lasting change to end poverty and suffering.
- Kristian Carter, Oxford University graduate from technology PR company IF Communications, who will blow apart some myths related to social media;
Event manager Paul Squires from digital media agency Perera, said: “We are delighted to bring one of the world’s leading forums on social media to Oxford. This is a first for the city and we hope to support the development of the digital economy in Oxford going forward.”
Event details
12th May, 10am to 4pm
Jam Factory, 27 Park Street End, Oxford OX1 1HU
Only 30 tickets are available at £20 (inclusive of drinks and food)
Available at www.amiando.com/media140Oxford.
‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ says famed entrepreneurial scoundrel Charlie Croker played by Michael Caine in the 1969 British gold-heist classic, The Italian Job.
The film and that infamous line – which still ranks among Britain’s most quoted – are where my thoughts turn when I think about media140’s two upcoming events at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy from April 21 to 25.
Our version may not involve gold bullion, mini-skirts or breaking into jail, but we may be just ostentatious enough to imagine it has the potential to match the movie for energy, thrills and creativity.
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For those who have not had the pleasure of seeing The Italian Job, it opens with a Lamborghini winding through the alps – just as the Media140 team shall too be heading into the beautiful Italian countryside – albeit in a marginally less glamorous minivan.
Perhaps this point of difference is a good thing, as that Lamborghini meets a spectacularly explosive fate at the hands of the mafia scarce minutes into the film.
The IJF (as it is affectionately known by those wishing to save characters) brings together an eclectic throng of journalists from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. This year’s keynote speaker is Al Gore – yes, the environmental activist who served as vice president of the United States under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and is oft credited with being instrumental in the rise of the Internet.
If Mr Gore is not enough reason to book your flight now, it is well worth a click-through to this list of literally dozens of international media executives, innovators and academics who will be sharing their ideas in Perugia – which is itself a vibrant hub of culture and progress.
In addition to presenting two days’ worth of speakers and panels at the IJF, Media140’s crew of specialised ‘backpacker reporters’ will cover the festival using only hand-held devices and online publishing tools. Flips, iPhones, Nokia N96s, audioBoo and Qik will be the kind of apparatus with which we break into the festival’s vault of brilliant ideas just like Croker and his crew – minus the criminality.
Lead editorially by the much more softly-spoken Claire Wardle, the Media140 team admittedly has little in common with Croker’s band of thieves apart from the unique and honed skills each one of them brings to the – err – job. Moreover, Croker had just one ‘computer specialist’ and Wardle will have a gaggle* of them.
media140 will not be blowing the doors off of anything, but we certainly plan to blow minds with a powerful fusion of social inquiry, journalism and technological exploration.
Tickets to the festival are – astonishingly – free. All you have to do is make your way to picturesque Umbria in late April, where spring will most probably just have sprung.
When Italians hope to meet again, they say ‘arrivederci’ – and that is what we bid you!
Ande Gregson – Founder, media140
*All suggestions for a collective noun for computer specialists are welcome in the comments section below …
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