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Mobile
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Is your company invisible without an iPhone app?
Speaking as a CES panelist, NewsGator Media & Consumer Products GM Walker Fenton told the audience, “You’ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you’ve got to be on the Web.” Not having an iPhone app today, he suggested, is like not having a website 10 years ago. Without an iPhone app, you don’t exist.
It’s a sentiment I’m seeing echoed by a lot of observers and analysts. I appreciate the enthusiasm and understand where it’s coming from. And while your organization may well benefit from an iPhone app, it’s not a requirement. What is required is developing a strategy for smart phones.
Marketers and communicators should look at two issues when making plans for their presence in the mobile phone space.
First, is an app the answer at all?
Claiming that apps are a requirement is putting tactics before strategy. Whether to release a smartphone app should be the answer to the question: “What tactics can we employ to achieve the objectives that drive our strategy?” I imagine “We need an iPhone app” is as common an assertion today as “We need a brochure” was 20 years ago. Those who “needed” a brochure had rarely performed the due diligence to determine that a brochure was the most effective means of accomplishing their goals.
As one commenter noted in response to Fenton’s assertion, “If you have a website, you’re already on every smartphone.” If there’s a requirement for every organization regarding smartphones, it’s to bring their websites up to snuff for viewing on phones.
Having the mobile-ready site is a first step; the next is making sure people can find it. “Make sure that the redirects are in place so that most mobile browsers will end up (at your mobile-ready site),” writes Steve Smith at Mobile Insider. While Smith recognizes that 2010 will be the year of mobile-ready content that employs a lot of creativity,
It is going to have to be creativity with a purpose. I did a quick review of brands’ mobile sites the other day and found that there is a substantial difference between merely having a mobile “presence” and having a mobile purpose.
This is a no-brainer, given the shift of web consumption from the computer to the mobile phone. Morgan Stanley, in "
The Mobile Internet Report” released last month, proclaimed that “More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.” Yet I’m routinely surprised at the number of companies that haven’t taken even the first tentative steps to address this trend.
Adam Cahill, writing for ClickZ News, suggests a three-phase approach to strategizing your adoption of mobile technology as a marketing/communications channel:
- Assess the impact of the persistently connected consumer is on your your industry and your business. “How, when, and where do consumers use mobile to make buying decisions about what you sell?”
- Commit a “predictable and sizable” part of your budget to developing the right channels for bringing your brand to the mobile space.
- Figure out how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your mobile efforts.
I have no doubt the m-dot and mobile app space will be littered with a lot of useless crap that satisfies somebody’s insistenhce that “we have a mobile presence.” Those who adopt strategies that satisfy customers’ real needs and desires, solve their problems, simplify their lives or allow them to do something they could never do before (for instance, with location-based phone tools) will actually produce measurable results.
I have to wonder if NewsGator’s Fenton remembers all the terrible, useless websites that sprung up like weeds in response to the mandate, “You’ve got to have a website.”
If an app is an answer, what platforms should you consider?
When the iPhone was released, it was (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted) a game-changer. My reaction to the iPhone’s introduction turns out to have been correct: It will force other mobile phone companies to step up their game in order to compete. Initially, in one corner stood the iPhone, simple to use and adaptable to its owners needs. In the other corner were a host of crappy phones everyone hate because they were hard to use and didn’t do what their owners needed them to do.
Today, the marketplace hosts a number of viable competitors to the iPhone, many of which sport features with which the iPhone can’t compete (like multitasking). Even in the rare air of celebrity geek circles, iPhones have been abandoned in favor of the Motorola’s Droid and some other contenders. (Sometimes this is because of the Droid’s features, including a real keyboard; sometimes it’s conceding the iPhone just isn’t worth the problems associated with AT&T’s service.)
In fact, 28% of those who plan to buy a smartphone plan to get Apple’s product, but 21% will buy an Android and 18% a Blackberry. Add the 9% who will opt for a Windows phone or one sporting WebOS (Palm’s platform, currently available on the Pre and the Pixi), nearly half of the smartphones being sold will not be iPhones. It seems to me, then, that if you build only an iPhone app, you’ll be invisible to half your target market.
Gartner expects Android to surpass the iPhone by 2012, while Nokia’s Symbian—currently the market leader—will own 37.4% of the market. The iPhone will be in third place.(As of last August, Symbian commanded about half the market. The BlackBerry had about 20% and the iPhone wasin third place with 13%.)
The analogy of an iPhone app to a website isn’t an apt one because of competing platforms. HTML is an open platform—pages rendered (to varying degrees) on any browser whether it was installed on a Mac, a PC, or a Linux/UNIX box. Smartphone apps, conversely, need to be developed separately for each platform.
If your strategy leads you to conclude that apps are necessary, you’ll need to produce them for each of the key platforms, the cost of which—both time and money—will need to be factored into your planning. That’s part of the serious budgeting Cahill recommends in his three-step planning process.
You’ll also need to figure out how your effort integrates with your communication through all the other channels you’re already using.
The fundamentals apply
Ultimately, communicators should apply the same strategic planning that works for any communication effort:
- Identify the need or opportunity
- Identify the audiences to reach in order to take advantage of the opportunity or satisfy the need
- Articulate the goals and objectives you will have to achieve in order to succeed at the effort
- Determine the tactics you’ll implement in support of the goals and objectives. (These would include smartphone apps.)
- Measure and evaluate the project outcomes.
While it’s easier to jump up and down like a five-year-old in a toy store shouting, “I want an iPhone app! I want an iPhone app!” it’s smarter to strategize your inevitable adoption of the smartphone as a key communication channel.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
More thoughts on work-life integration
Yesterday I shared my thoughts about the shift from work-life balance to work-life integration. My definition (but certainly not the process) is simple: Work-life balance presumes a clear boundary between work and the rest of your life while integration assumes you’ll be doing both all the time.
Some of the comments that resulted from the post challenged the idea of work-life integration, which led me to conclude that I didn’t explain its roots.
I had an engaging exchange on Twitter with Jim Ryan, a staff writer for the Central Pennsylvania Business Journal, who objected to what he saw as my insistence that people in the workforce adopt the various technologies that have found their way into the world of work. “If you want to plug your head into a machine 24/7, be my guest,” he tweeted. “But don’t insist that be the norm for all others.”
I’m certainly not insisting anything. Rather, I am observing that this has become the norm. The completely unscientific poll I introduced in the earlier post is running 70-30—70% of respondents check work-related email first thing upon getting up in the morning, before anything else.
This trend is not about technology any more than the habit of gathering around a radio, and then a TV set, was about technology. Technology enables cultural change, but the family huddling around the TV was the result of the popularization of a new entertainment form.
The network technologies that allow us to stay connected and communicate with anyone from anywhere are fusing with our culture just as radio and TV did. While those of us working in this space may focus on, obsess over and debate the technologies, the average person out there couldn’t care less.
My 20-year-old daughter—and her entire social circle—serves as an example. Her mobile phone is always with her. It’s always buzzing or launching into any among dozens of ringtones. She doesn’t care all that much about the manufacturer of the phone, the operating system, or the next great thing on the product horizon. She’s barely aware of Android.
In fact, Rachel is baffled by my obsession with emerging technologies. But if I told her she had to go on vacation without her phone, she’d look at me like I had just landed here from somewhere in the Adromeda system. For Rachel, it’s not a question of whether she’s plugged into a machine 24/7. It’s a question of being in or out of touch with her network of friends and colleagues. In her paradigm, 24/7 connectivity is just the way things are. And the connectivity is with people, not with platforms, algorithms or systems configurations.
Work connections are just part of the mix. Work and social contacts get mooshed together. Sprint and Palm recognized this phenomenon and incorporated it into the design of the Palm Pre. When I got my Pre, I identified my various email accounts and calendars, and the Pre aggregates them into a single view. Is it work or personal? Color codes differentiate it, but all activities are combined into a single calendar and emails into a single email stream. The Pre recognizes the shift from a clear boundary between work and life into a world where it’s all the same.
Compounding the phenomenon is the fact that it has permeated all demographics, not just Rachel’s segment and younger. Certainly there are fewer people embracing the integration as the demographic line trends older, but there are people in every group for whom the difference between work connections and others have blurred beyond distinction.
You’ll rarely, if ever, hear anyone of Rachel’s generation suggest you should “unplug.” Being plugged-in is a tactical, mechanical concept that has nothing to do with the conversation and information mediated by devices. To suggest to Rachel that she unplug is like telling suggesting she enclose herself in an isolation tank. The technology is just the means to the end of connection with real people. That’s all that matters. It’s not about being plugged in; it’s about being in touch, with everyone, all the time.
Posted by Shel on 07/14 at 12:18 PM
Mobile • Social Networking • Technology • (3) Comments • (1) Trackbacks • PermalinkMonday, July 13, 2009
Work-life balance is dead. Deal with it.
Former GE CEO Jack Welch is causing quite a stir today with remarks quoted in a Wall Street Journal article insisting that, for women, there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are consequences to the choices you make, Welch says, and if you’re not at work “in the clutch”—presumably because you’re home dealing with your child or taking maternity leave—you could be passed over when opportunities for promotion arise.
Whether this is cold, hard reality or an unwillingness to accommodate fundamental human biology is open to debate. The fact that men have a competitive advantage simply because they don’t give birth seems fundamentally unfair. But on the broader issue of work-life balance, Welch is absolutely right, except it’s a gender-neutral problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. Unless you’re earning an hourly wage under a collective bargaining agreement, work-life balance is a relic of a bygone age.
Today, it’s all about work-life integration.
The concept of work-life balance suggests a clear line of demarcation between your job and the rest of your life. When you go home, work ceases to be a factor and you can focus on your family, your friends, your hobbies and other interests.
Here’s a Twitter poll question for you:
I can almost certainly predict the results. When I ask this question of an audience, most people raise their hands—yes, their first conscious act upon waking is to grab the mobile phone off the bedside table and see if anything pressing came up while they slept.
Seriously, when was the last time you went to work at 9 a.m., left at 5 p.m. and took no work home with you? It’s one reason I resist companies blocking access to non-work-related websites. Companies that insist employees should not be permitted non-work-related Web surfing during work hours should also accept that employees will engage in no non-home-related activities when they’re away from the office.
I excluded hourly union workers, but even this demographic is now going online to their company intranets that are increasingly accessible from home, not to mention representing their companies in conversations taking place on social networks.
Work-life integration acknowledges that the line of demarcation has evaporated, but also recognizes that the distinction between time spent at work and time spent elsewhere is equally fuzzy. If I spend two hours at home tonight doing work, why should anyone at work give a damn if I spend 90 minutes on Facebook while I’m at the office? The only question is whether my work is getting done, on time, and the quality of my work meets or exceeds what the company expects.
To a large extent, this could address the women-having-babies issue, too. I was struck by Russell Crowe’s character in “Body of Lies.” Ed Hoffman is a CIA honcho who conducts most of his business over a mobile phone while driving his kids to school or taking them to the park or getting ready for dinner with the family. It just doesn’t matter where you are or what else you’re doing, as long as the job gets done.
Work-life integration has replaced work-life balance. Now we just need the business world to catch on.
Posted by Shel on 07/13 at 10:37 AM
Mobile • Technology • (15) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • PermalinkThursday, June 18, 2009
The Palm Pre’s missed marketing opportunity
It has now been more than a week since I got my Palm Pre and I’m even happier with it now than I was when I wrote my review last week. I’ve grown comfortable with the interface and the gestures that make it work. I’ve personalized the calendar, contact list, and email. I’ve been using the universal search (which rocks) and the Synergy features, which really do set the Pre apart from the iPhone. And I’ve been using some of the few apps that are available.
As I noted in my review, the phone has only been available for a couple weeks and the SDK (software developer kit) is still being put through its paces prior to release into the wild for anybody to develop Pre applications. I understand this, and that Apple has had two years to get to the 40,000 some-odd apps that now populate the iPhone’s app store.
Still, I’m jonesing for apps. Jonesing bad. As my podcast co-host Neville Hobson has said repeatedly, it’s all about the apps.
So, at least twice a day, I’ve been visiting the app catalog and tapping the “Recent” category to see if anything has been added. And I routinely heave a sigh when I see that, no, nothing new is available.
And therein lies a missed marketing opportunity.
Knowing the SDK wouldn’t be ready and only a handful of apps (like Pandora) would populate the app catalog, the companies should have made arrangements with some of the hotter apps developers to churn out one new app every day. People like me, repeatedly checking the catalog, would find and download the new offering, then talk, blog, and tweet about it. The news stream would then be full of Pre commentary, and not just more rehashing of the phone’s highlights and shortcomings.
It’s worth pointing out that an early analysis of Pre sales indicates that most of the new phones have been upgrades by existing Sprint customers; the Pre has not lured new customers away from AT&T, Verizon, T*Mobile or any of the other carriers. Continuous enthusiastic chatter about a steady stream of new apps that do amazing things would help getting the competition’s customers to pay more attention and gradually begin to covet a Pre.
Sprint could have touted its “App a Day” campaign, proudly satisfying its customers’ appetite even as the finishing touches are put on the SDK.
Instead, Pre owners are left to wonder when a new app might appear. Like I say, a missed marketing opportunity.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
My review of the Palm Pre
I finally got my hands on a Palm Pre, which I’m loving.
As much as I have coveted the iPhone, I’ve avoided getting one for a number of reasons. First, there’s AT&T, whose service I abandoned several years ago. The iPhone is great, but it still is exclusive to AT&T, and my experiences that were so bad I’m just not willing to relive them.
Beyond that, I want a real tactile keyboard. Apps are great but email, Twitter and texting occupy most of my time with a smartphone, and I just couldn’t get comfortable typing fast on the screen-based keyboard that is the iPhone’s only option. In fact, most people I know with an iPhone also carry a Blackberry or some other phone. The iPhone is their portable computer; the other phone is for email, texting and phone calls.
My travel schedule also demands that I be able to swap a fresh battery for a depleted one on the fly. I can’t stop and recharge my phone when it dies. That was another iPhone deal-killer for me.
So I was thrilled when the Pre was unveiled at CES—and named best product at the show. I’m already a Sprint customer, which I consider one of the hidden benefits of the Pre. The night before the Pre went on sale last Saturday, I called the store closest to me. The sales rep confirmed they’d have phones and I’d be able to score one if I got in line early enough. I was there around 6 a.m., but just before the store opened, a manager stepped outside and informed us the phones would only be given to those who had pre-ordered. I was furious as I sped to another store, where I was number 38 in line. I would have gotten a phone—the store had about 70—but because I had to be at a meeting, I couldn’t wait.
I tweeted my frustration at the first store—a franchise outlet, not a company store—and within a few minutes had a phone call and an email from a district manager who found me a phone and scheduled a time that accommodated my schedule for me to come pick it up and get it activated. That’s service, particularly since I was more interested in letting Sprint know about the issue with the franchise store (not my first problem with them) than in getting a phone (plenty will be available everywhere shortly).
So I’ve now had the phone for a couple days and can offer these observations.
It feels great. The phone fits comfortably in my hand or in my pocket. It has a nice, solid feel to it. It’s a bit thicker than the iPhone (accommodating the battery and the slide-out keyboard), but it’s also shorter. The incredibly sharp image shows that you don’t need a long phone in order to get great visuals.
The interface rocks. Operating the Pre is drop-dead easy. The main menu is activated by dragging your finger from the gesture area, just below the bottom of the screen, upward. Tap an icon to activate it, then swipe your finger left in the gesture area to turn it into a “card.” You can have multiple cards open at any one time, and navigate through them to enlarge the one you want to use. Getting rid of a card is a simple “flick” upward.
Phone quality is terrific. It’s a smartphone, which some of the smartphone makers seem to have forgotten. The quality of audio over the handset is great, maybe the best I’ve ever heard on a mobile phone, and I’m told by those who’ve called me or whom I’ve called that I sound great to them. The audio quality over my Bluetooth earbud is also better than it was with my last phone.
The camera takes amazingly good pictures. The 3.2 megapixel camera with built-in flash produces sharp images, like this unretouched image I shot of Scott Monty and Beth Harte at a pre-conference reception for BlogPotomac last week.
There’s no video camera yet (which is a drag, since I’ve been using my phone to demo Qik at conferences), but one is due via firmware upgrade, from what I’ve been told.
The app catalog currently is anemic but so was the iPhone app store when it was first released. I don’t buy the arguments that, given the iPhone’s two-year lead, the Pre app catalog should have come fully populated. The OS is new and Palm is cautiously introducing new apps regularly (one for Evernote just came out in the last day or two). The WebOS SDK has been touted as incredibly easy to use, so I fully expect a steady stream of apps, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that some popular iPhone-only apps, like AudioBoo, will be made available in Pre versions. The apps I’ve grabbed so far, though, are terrific, including Tweed, a Twitter client.
In the meantime, an app called “Classic” has been released that lets you run older Palm applications on the Pre. Since I kill a lot of time waiting in lines and the like playing backgammon, this has proven a useful tool. I’ve also grabbed several of the apps that are available, including Tweed, a nifty Twitter client, AccuWather, and Pandora. In fact, I jacked the Pre into my car’s auxiliary input and listened to Pandora through the car speakers on my drive home from the airport yesterday. That was awfully damned cool.
The web browser might as well be the iPhone’s, which is a good thing. It loads quickly, runs Flash, and you can zoom in and out with the same pinching gesture as the iPhone uses.
Video player is terrific. I’ve been watching YouTube videos and others, which look gorgeous.
I’ve experienced a couple unprompted shutdown. On more than one occasion, I’ve pulled the phone from its holster only to find it shut off, requiring a restart. It also shut down once when I closed the keyboard a little too hard. I’m hopeful this will be addressed with a firmware update.
The keyboard is great. I’ve read a number of criticisms of the keyboard, but I don’t agree with them at all. I find it remarkably easy to thumb-type quickly, even faster than I could on my last phone, the HTC Touch Pro, the keyboard for which is considerably bigger. Also, the way the keyboard curves when slid out provides an angle that makes typing even easier.
There’s an issue with the power button. The power button is in the upper right-hand corner, which is easy to get to with your thumb, but when the keyboard is out, the power button drops out of reach. You can touch any key on the keyboard to bring the phone back from sleep mode, but I automatically reach for that power button. This is another design issue I expect will be addressed in the next iteration.
The data integration functionality looks like a major innovation. The “synergy” feature, as it’s being marketed, is one of the true points of differentiation for the Pre. There is no single point source for calendars, contacts, or tasks. Rather, you indicate where all these reside—whether it’s the Google calendar or Outlook—and it’s all linked up in the cloud, allowing you to pull everything together. I haven’t had much opportunity to use this yet, but it’ll definitely make life easier. Here’s a brief video that explains it.
Another nice touch is that notifications of recent emails and text messages show up on the bottom of the home screen.
Touchstone is awesome. The Touchstone, a separate accessory, puts a whole new spin on recharging a phone. Just set the Pre on the Touchstone (it adheres magnetically) and it recharges without requiring any cables to be jacked in. I’ve gone home, yanked the phone from its holster and dropped it on the Touchstone. Done! It’s not that big a deal to plug in a mini or micro USB cable, but there’s something about simply setting your phone down to charge it that feels like a major convenience.
Sprint services run exceptionally well on the Pre, including Sprint TV and Sprint navigation (which offers turn-by-turn directions, traffic information, and other services).
Nice touches are sprinkled throughout the phone, like the ability to copy text and take JPG screen captures.
Is it an iPhone killer?
I’ve been asked repeatedly if I think the Pre is an iPhone killer. When Applie first released the iPhone, my dominant reaction was that Apple had raised the expectation bar for smart phones, but that Nokia and other manufacturers wouldn’t sit idly and allow Apple to erode their market share. One Blackberry model outsold the iPhone in April and the iPhone, for all the attention it gets, commands just 1% of the global mobile phone market.
Nothing will kill the iPhone. It’s an elegant piece of innovation with huge cachet and a well-stocked app store. The Pre—which has sold briskly at the outset and been met with generally glowing reviews—represents a solid entry into the market and probably the first to offer some innovative and desirable features not available in the iPhone (like the synergy functionality). When a host of new Android phones are unleashed later this year, the competitive landscape will be even more crowded.
For right now, the Pre is the phone for me. And I have a new daily task: Check the app catalog for new downloads.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Is your company about to miss the next communication trend?
Companies and their communicators are well known for missing important technology trends and then having to play catchup. Desktop publishing was the first one I experienced first-hand, followed in rapid succession by email, the World Wide Web, and social media.
When companies miss these developments, not only do they have to struggle to get up to speed, they also have to deal with whatever rushes in to fill the vacuum. When desktop publishing made its first appearance in the mid-1980s, companies without policies and strategies had to cope with departments and employees creating their own newsletters. A presage of things to come, these newsletters overwhelmed employees who, rather than getting everything from the internal communications department, now had to read through dozens or even hundreds of newsletters. And reading them wasn’t easy, given 30 different fonts that populated these newsletters, some in six points, contained in a seven-column format on an 8-1/2 x 11-inch document. And let’s not forget the clip art. (I must’ve seen the winged moneybag 500 times.)
Today, businesses and their communicators are poised to get caught with their pants down again. This time, the trend staring us in the face is glaringly obvious to many:
Smartphones are poised to become the next evolution of the computer.
While some marketers are exploring the mobile phone as a communication channel and many media properties have created mobile versions for their content, surprisingly few companies have—or are even considering—a mobile communication strategy.
Despite the Apple’s boast that the iPhone’s browser offers the Web and not just the mobile Web, a smartphone strategy doesn’t simply duplicate content designed to be viewed on a 20-inch monitor. A sound strategy takes advantage of the phone’s other capabilities, such as the built-in camera.
Microsoft Tags, which ZDNet blogger Zack Whittaker calls “the most important technology Microsoft has developed so far,” is one of those developments that could hasten the adoption of the smartphone as a portable computer (along with the availability of models like the iPhone, the Palm Pre, and the inevitable rollout of improved Android models).
The idea behind Tags is simple (and, while in beta, free). You visit the Tag site and indicate what you want the tag to do: dial a number, open a Web page, produce a map or directions, play a video, whatever. After entering a bit more information, the site produces an attractive bar code made up of colored triangles. (Microsoft plans to add the other main bar code standards later.)
The tag reader is available for all smartphone platforms.
I created two tags. One automagically dials my office number (which is, in fact, a SkypeIn number that automatically forwards to my mobile phone if not answered in three rings). The other loads my Web page. The first is on the front my business card, the second on the back. It works like a dream. Here’s a short 50-second video I shot showing how it works:
The potential for Tags in communication is huge. But Tags are just one of an endless stream of uses to which that mobile phone can be used for organizational communications. For example, we can finally stop complaining about the inability of the intranet to reach employees who do not spend their days at a computer. In fact, just as I was about to publish this post, I got a tweet from Paolo Tosolini at Microsoft, who had created a video showing how Tags can be used for internal communications (bear with it—the video is mostly about Microsoft Surface but Tags show up about five minutes into the six-minute video):
As more and more people begin to adopt the smartphone as their portable computer, companies will fall further behind the curve. Don’t let your company be among them.
Does your organization already have a strategy for communicating through smartphones? Leave a comment.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Using your Blackberry to shoot yourself in the foot
I talk to an increasing number of people who wake up in the morning and instantly grab their Blackberry from the bedside table to check work email. Dealing with work on your smartphone is a huge example of the end of work-life balance, but it’s not the only one. Conference calls with Asia at 2 a.m., getting reports done while on vacation, following work-related developments online over the weekend…it’s all typical for knowledge workers. Just as the news cycle has gone 24 hours, so has the work cycle.
It is because nobody outside of the assembly line works from 9 to 5 that the use of at-work networks for non-work-related activities should not only be tolerated by encouraged. A recent study—not conducted by an organization with a financial interest in helping companies bloock access—there are perfectly legitimate reasons for employees to engage in these non-work or semi-work-related activities while at the office and, further, that blocking could backfire and result in lost productivity.
(The study was published in the June issue of the CyberPsychology and Behaviour Journal.)
Leave it to some workers to want to return to the days of the clear line between work and leisure. CNN is reporting that employees are making noise about being compensated for the time they spend on their Blackberries while away from the office. Producers and reporters for ABC News have evidently reached an agreement with management to pay them for their smartphone activities. Lawyers are warning companies that they can expect more such demands.
Talk about shooting themselves in their collective feet. If a company pays you for the time you spend doing work away from the office, then they have every right to expect you will devote every minute in the office to work. And that’s just denial of the 24-hour work cycle that can only lead to complications of multiple stripes. From compensation practices to the fine line between online activities with and without work dimensions (for instance, representing your company well while engaging in primarily non-work networking), things could get very ugly in a hurry. It seems companies aren’t the only ones that need to wake up to the realities of the networked world. Add greedy, clueless employees (and, in some cases, the unions that represent them) to those ranks, too.
