Social networks

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Moving beyond the organic benefits of open employee access to social networks

As more than half of the companies in the U.S. continue to block employee access to social media sites, the organizations that maintain open channels are positioned to innovate and compete at levels that could crush their competition.

Being poised to extract value from a workforce that is networked 24/7 isn’t the same as taking the steps required to get there.

I intend to continue the campaign to end the conterproductive practice of blocking employees from their online communities. But the time has come to shift the focus from those companies that can’t see the opportunities inherent in a workforce that is connected to thousands of other people. Let them flounder and fail as their competitors tease new business opportunities from these networks, identify and recruit top talent, spot problems and address them before they become crises, and build a larger, more loyal customer base.

In fact, the best way to convince organizations that blocking works against their self-interest is to have them watch their more enlightened competitors kick their asses in the marketplace.

Some would argue that all a company needs to unleash this power is connected employees freed to connect to their networks. Business, though, is all about achieving established goals. The processes companies establish to produce the best results from employees’ organic networking activities will determine who really wins.

I see three types of processes organizations can model:

• Employees share information of value, such as complaints, product improvement ideas, ideas for new products and services, and competitive intelligence
• Departments initiate systems that integrate resources employees contribute from their networks into existing processes (for example, recruiters tapping into employees’ professional networks to identify the next key hire)
• Companies activate employees for focused efforts from product launches to political actdion to customer service (like Best Buy’s Twelpforce effort on Twitter)

Organic networking is just the first step

To realize these kinds of benefits, organizations can’t rely solely on employees’ organic social networking activities. Yes, some value can certainly be derived from the communities with which employees already engage. But consider the difference between a bunch of prospectors with pans in the river versus a mining company armed with geologic data and the best minds inside and outside the company working together. Which approach will produce the most gold?

Sustainability is just one reason to be more systematic about business use of social media. One recruiter who is smart enough to ask employees to tap their networks to identify the best candidate for a job may produce some great results, but what happens when she leaves the company? When social media is left only at the organic state, most efforts aren’t sustainable.

(I know of one company that had a fanstastic internal podcast that died when the producer took a new job with another company. That never happened with employee publications, which the company viewed as integral communication, as part of the management process. Strategic processes don’t simply fade away just because the champion left the company or changed jobs.)

In a recent post, Brian Solis argued that the brand management role is now every employees’ responsibility:

When we listen to the activity that populates the statusphere and the blogosphere, we find that in addition to the overall brand, conversations map specifically to the individual departments that define the business foundation, which ultimately supports brand stature and resonance. In turn, these activities inspire immediate and long-term responses either directly through focused interaction or indirectly through product refinement, adaptation and overall messaging, targeting, and positioning.

Brian’s right, and in his post he outlines a process for evaluating conversations based on keyword discovery (collected at a central source) with relevant information parsed to the right departments so they can incorporate this intelligence into their operations.

Turning noise into business results

But this still doesn’t address those thousands of networks to which the frontline employees belong. And without processes, all those conversations that could lead to improved sales, the next great product or the next key hire is all just a lot of unrefined data. It’s just noise. Processes filter out the crap and turn the remaining data into information, and from information into actionable knowledge.

Employees in your company are listening to their networks. Some are even talking to their colleagues about what they’re hearing Few companies, however, are positioned to activate those employees or the data they’re accumulating:

• The cultures don’t support it.
• The processes necessary to inspire those responses don’t exist.
• Internal communication doesn’t provide employees with the intelligence they need to interact with their communities beneficially.
• Training efforts don’t let employees know what to do with the information they obtain or how to react to it.
• Business and product literacy among employees is shockingly low.

 

In other words, companies don’t have the foundation to support connecting networked employees with business goals.

As companies begin to recognize the competitve advantage currently dormant in employees’ networks, many will make mistakes by implementing programs that smack of astroturfing, asking employees to convey common messages to their networks. Others will install layers of bureacracy that ultimately hinder rather than encourage employees bringing the power of their networks to bear on the company’s business.

Identifying existing business processes and models already working in companies—and developing new ones—are top priorities for me. In fact, it’s the subject of the pre-conference session I’m conducting at the NewComm Forum next month. (“Becoming a Networked Organization” will take place on Tuesday, April 20 beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the conference venue in San Mateo, California.) It’s also the subject of the next book I hope to write.

It is time to move beyond this notion that large, complex organizations can accure the greatest benefit from social media by sitting back while employees join in conversations—someone from sales chatting with this person, someone from finance joining that community—without resources to inform their contributions to the dialogue, without the means by which they can share what they learn, and without mechanisms to filter the data and turn it into action.

Let the companies that block employees keep blocking. But if you want your organization to reap the rewards of open access, you need to start thinking—now, today—about how best to leverage it.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

WOMMA to issue guide to social media marketing disclosure

UPDATE: WOMMA has issued its press release on its new guidelines for social media disclosure.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is set to issue a guide to disclosure in social media marketing sometime tomorrow, February 17. The guide was prompted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines for disclosure of relationships between companies and people discussing them and their products or services in social media venues.

The document is designed to enhance rather than replace the rules that may already exist in your organization. And it’s WOMMA’s intention to continually update the guide given the ongoing evolution of social media.

The guide covers the most commonly used social media channels, including blogs, Twitter and other microblogging tools, social network status updates, video and photo sharing sites and podcasts.

The microblogging hashtag recommendations could be problematic, given the number of similar proposals that have been introduced over the last year or so. (Here’s one proposal; here’s another, and another.) But if all WOMMA members adopt the tags the guide recommends, we may see some consistency emerge around how disclosure is handled on Twitter. The three tags listed in the guide include…

• #spon—Sponsored
• #paid—Paid
• #samp—Sample

WOMMA advises using the same tags on status updates through social networks should there be a character limit in the status update function.

The best advice in the guide—which applies to all of the channels covered—is to provide a link to a complete disclosure and relationships statement, although recommended language for such a statement isn’t included.

The document does recommend language for disclosure that is

clear and prominent. Language should be easily understood and unambiguous. Placement of the disclosure must be easily viewed and not hidden deep in the text or deep on the page. All disclosures should appear in a reasonable font size and color that is both reasable and noticeable to consumers.

For example, for personal and editorial blogs, WOMMA recommends disclosure like…

• I received ___ (product or sample) ___ from ___ (company name), or
• (Company name) ___ sent me ___ (product or sample) ___

WOMMA went through a deliberate process to develop the guide, including creating a blog, Living Ethics, that served as a forum for comments and questions.

I’ll update this post tomorrow when a link becomes available to the official WOMMA guide.

Oh, and by way of disclosure, I was offered a sneak peek at the guide by WOMMA and was not put under an embargo until tomorrow’s announcement.

Monday, February 08, 2010

Blocking access isn’t the only way to protect your company

In a comment left recently to a post I wrote for Stop Blocking back in October 2007 about malware on Facebook, David Jones with CommerceMicro wrote:

Stupid, out dated information.

We have users that repeatedly get infected with viruses and spyware no matter what level or type of antivirus and antispyware software we install. It’s rather odd that ONLY THOSE particular users get re-infected day after day and that they all have MySpace accounts, FaceBook accounts, or whatever. Their employers have to continually pay us to come and clean these infections.

My reply was a bit terse. I asked Jones if he believed all the companies that don’t block access were lying about not encountering the problems he cited. (And no, I wasn’t snarky enough to point out that “outdated” is one word.)

The security issue does, however, appear to be supplanting productivity concerns as the main reason companies block access to Facebook and other social media sites. Among the dominant social networks, Facebook presents the biggest risk to company security, according to 60% of the respondents to a survey of 500 companies conducted by Sophos, an IT security organization. No other network comes close. MySpace ranks second, with 18% of companies identifying it as a concern, followed by Twitter (17%) and LinkedIn (4%).

The concerns are not illegitimate. The incidents of reported malware and spam attacks through social networks has jumped 70% since April of last year. Social networks have become common launching pads fore a couple of particularly nasty worms. The risk of infection, though, is not the only security issue that keeps IT staff up at night. Employees’ individual behavior represents a risk, particularly as web-unsavvy employees fall prey to phishing and other devious ploys. And then there’s the fear that employees will share information they shouldn’t.

Sarah Perez goes into considerable detail on the Sophos report in her post on ReadWriteWeb. Perez also notes that even Sophos isn’t advocating an outright block, despite the study’s findings:

Unfortunately for those in charge of enforcing corporate security, simply blocking Facebook and other social networks via URL is not a realistic solution anymore. The networks are often a large part of a company’s marketing and sales strategies, notes Sophos, meaning they cannot be blocked outright. Instead, companies are encouraged to use a unified approach for mitigating threats that combines data monitoring, malware protection and granular access for their employees.

A Financial Times article (free registration required) has the same advice, noting that organizations have too much to gain from employee interactions on social networks. The article, penned by the head of an information risk management and e-discovery firm, rightly notes that letting employees access social networks from work gives them “the ability to locate the right people, information and expertise quickly, but they also greatly aid external networking, sales and marketing activities.”

The article (which I discovered on the Idea Peepshow blog, notes that 89% of businesses in the UK have no policies governing employee use of social networks and calls for companies to establish and enforce such policies.

As I’ve noted before, protecting the company is a matter of ensuring the proper network safeguards are in place (such as anti-malware/spyware software and the latest virus definitions) and that employees understand their responsibilities.

It works in a lot of companies that don’t block access. It can work in yours.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

What Employee Communications looks like in the networked company

Awareness is rising of the impact on business of networked employees—those workers who are continuously connected to their social circles and can tap into them at will. The discussion seems to be shifting, ever so slowly, to the characteristics of companies that, rather than inhibiting these traits, want to reap the benefits of a networked workforce. Recent posts by Olivier Blanchard and Valeria Maltoni have speculated on the nature of these companies. Olivier calls them P2P companies; Valeria refers to them as connected companies.

They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”

You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.

Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier,  I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.

Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.

Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.

Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.

Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.

Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.

Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.

Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.

Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)

Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.

All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.

What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Boston hospital jerks its knee, blocks employee access to social media

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Abuse of an established company policy is a management issue. Even when it involves company systems, it is not an IT issue. The abdication of management responsibilities to IT may briefly create the perception that the problem has been solved. In fact, a larger problem has been created.

Consider the case of a Boston-area hospital which has blocked access for all of its employees to social networking sites. According to a memo issued to employees,

The decision is based on recent evidence that some employees have been using these sites to comment on Hospital business, which is a violation of the Hospital’s Electronic Communications policy and a potential HIPAA violation.

In other words, the actions of a few employees have led the hospital’s management to ban access to these resources for all employees, including those who have abided by the hospital’s Electronic Communications policy. The message this sends to the majority of employees who play by the rules:

Your good behavior is irrelevant. We have opted to trust none of you.

This message can only result in deterioration of employee commitment and engagement. It would have taken more effort for the hospital to identify those who absued the privilege and discipline them according to the established policy. It would also have required some effort to communicate to the rest of the workforce that the hospital regretfully had to enforce the policy, and will continue to enforce it.

But employee behaviors are managed through reward and recognition. Recognizing that consequences will befall employees who violate policies is a sure way to obtain compliance. Sadly, it is far easier to simply block everybody than to take the correct steps.

But this hospital goes one jaw-dropping step further, noting in the memo that…

The Executive Team will be working in the coming months to ensure that we have written policies in place that articulate the appropriate use of social networking sites while on duty at the Hospital. Once these written policies are in place, we have educated all employees about expectations and disciplinary action associated with violating the policies, and we have the appropriate IS tools in place to track utilization and monitor content, we will consider once again providing access to these sites. We expect this will take a period of about 6 months.

Six months?

Several hospital social media policies are in place and available online, including those of The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Henry Ford Health, and The Cleveland Clinic. Why should even the most tangled of bureaucracies require six months to review the best practices and put a policy in place?

Finally, as I have noted before, most employees have cell phones and will be able to post exactly the same HIPAA violations to the same networks using their personal Internet-connected devices. Blocking access on hospital computers will prevent exactly nothing.

This is precisely the kind of brain-dead, mindless, knee-jerk reaction that is crippling organizations as they move ienvitably into a networked ecosystem. I learned about the situation on “Running a Hospital,” the blog by Paul Levy, CEO of another Boston-area hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess. Paul published the hospital memo in its entirety, but introduced it, in part, with these words:

you can guess my view of this: Any form of communication (even conversations in the elevator!) can violate important privacy rules, but limiting people’s access to social media in the workplace will mainly inhibit the growth of community and discourage useful information sharing. It also creates a generational gap, in that Facebook, in particular, is often the medium of choice for people of a certain age. I often get many useful suggestions from staff in their 20’s and 30’s who tend not to use email. Finally, consider the cost of building and using tools that attempt to “track utilization and monitor content.” Not worth the effort, I say.

There are voices of reason with an eye on the long-term view in the world of business. We need to spread those voices and offer the alternatives to mindless blocking of all content from all employees.

In this case, a clearly-communicated and enforced policy would have done the trick. Instead, this unnamed Boston-area hospital has taken proactive steps to disenfranchising its workforce while inhibiting the sharing of information and keeping virtually no employees from using these social sites.

Good move.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

The real-world work of Enterprise 2.0

I was struck by two items that surfaced in my RSS feeds this morning.

(Yes, I still use RSS. RSS is nowhere near dead. I understand that armies of people are abandoning RSS for “better” tools but, like Dave Winer, I think people confuse Google Reader with RSS. And, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’m fine with the growing abandonment RSS. The more who dismiss it, the more I’ll be the one to uncover useful and relevant content. But I digress.)

The first item featured ZDNet columnist Dennis Howlett howling that “enterprise 2.0” is a crock. “Business has more pressing problems,” he argues,” adding that “the world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses.” He concludes…

Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out - that’s easy.

It was funny, then, that the very next item I read, from CIO magazine, chronicles how no less an organization than Procter & Gamble produced bottom-line business results through the systematic introduction of in-house social networking.

The goal was simple, and one that seems to have escaped Howlett in his rant: P&G wanted to expand the way its employees collaborate, “incorporating Web 2.0 tools into a single platform to unlock weak and potential ties—employees with common goals or interests who have little to no contact.”

While Howlett rails that most people “just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on,” P&G saw the potential for social tools to allow “users to create value beyond their usual circles.”

P&G’s systematic approach began with skunkworks projects involving the blogs and wikis Howlett insists nobody cares about. Once the use of those tools became part of the fabric of work, the company settled on a platform, PeopleConnect from Telligent, that employees use “to form and join groups and to interact through blogs, wikis, forums and document stores.” Nearly 12,000 employees opted into the network before the company even formally launched it.

P&G is tracking the results both with metrics the system produces but also with genuine business outcomes. For example, a 150-person team, made up of employees situated in P&G facilities throughout the world, normally came together in about six to 12 months under the hierarchy to which Howlett seems to believe organizations are bound. Using PeopleConnect, it took two. Presumably, that means the results of the team’s efforts will begin generating profits four to 10 months sooner than normal.

P&G’s experience, is not, of course, the only bottom-line benefit organizations can point to as a result of adopting enterprise 2.0. Best Buy has reduced turnover and increased retail worker participation in the company’s retirement savings plan. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance has seen an increase in collaboration. Siemens USA is finding employees establishing knowledge contacts who might otherwise never have met.

Howlett asks, “Can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?”

In response, Hill & Knowlton’s Niall Cook—author of “Enterprise 2.0”—lists streamlining internal communication where overload has become the order of the day, getting sales people to share best practices, improving collaboration between people who otherwise would never connect, speeding the delivery of answers to questions.

When companies know the conditions that hinder speed to market, growth, innovation and collaboration, they can explore the options for overcoming those obstacles and adopt the strategies that move them forward. That’s what P&G and a growing number of companies have done—in fact, a study from AIIM notes that the number of companies embracing Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the past year. I doubt most of them are jumping on a bandwagon, but rather introducing systems designed to improve the bottom line.

I hope that answer’s Howlett’s question.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Revitalizing StopBlocking.org

With only so many hours in a day, I have to choose where to commit my energy. As a result, some projects take a back seat. But after pondering two sets of data, I’m recommitting myself to my Stop Blocking initiative.

But it won’t do any good if I do this by myself. I need help to keep the wiki updated.

Bear with me, and I’ll explain all.

First, the data

By themselves, both of these sets of data are intriguing. Juxtaposed, however, they’re startling. One one side, you have organizations warming up to social media, particularly as a channel for marketing. On the flip side, you have a surge in companies that are blocking their own employees’ access to social media.

Add to the mix the fact that internal social media—also known by names like enterprise web 2.0—is gathering steam, and you’re faced with a genuine conundrum.

Let’s review these stats, starting with business embracing social media. According to Equation Research’s “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” reported by eMarketer, 59% of brand marketers use social media, and the ranks will swell to 82% in the next year. A mere 13% claim they have no plans at all to jump into social media marketing.

This data reinforces the results of other research, like a study from the Association of National Advertisers that shows 66% of marketers have used social media in one form or another this year.

Returning to the Equation Research study, the results indicate that only 7% of companies don’t see social media as a good use of employee time.

Clearly, the companies surveyed by Equation weren’t the same ones analyzed by ScanSafe, which earned a boatload of free publicity when it released a study reporting a 20% increase in the number of companies blocking access to social media in the last six months.

So, companies want to market through social media but they don’t want their employees using it? First, that means employees will have to go home to participate in their own companies’ efforts. And second, if everybody follows suit, the total pool of consumers engaged in those marketing efforts will plummet.

But it gets more interesting when you look at the results of the Nielsen Norman Group‘s recent study, “Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets: A Report From the Front Lines of Enterprise Social Software Projects.” This in-depth research revealed that social software adopted by companies that produce significant results are nearly always introduced as under-the-radar grass-roots initiatives by front-line employees. That is, once social software efforts prove their worth, the powers that be push their implementation.

Let’s be clear: Employees who are not permitted to innovate with social media will not be able to introduce beneficial tools to the enterprise, ultimately costing these companies in untold ways, from innovation and collaboration to increased market share and profitability.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group nails it:

Social software is a trend that cannot be ignored. It is bringing about fundamental change to the way people expect to communicate with one another. Companies cannot use social tools with their customers and not also allow their employees to utilize them.

Yet, according to the data, that is exactly what’s happening.

So let’s summarize:

• Companies want to market using social media.
• Companies rely on employee grassroots efforts to identify social media that will pay off internally.
• Companies are blocking employee access to social media.

Is it just me or does the math just not add up here?

And now, the call to action

I started Stop Blocking a few years back out of frustration over the knee-jerk reasons company denied employees access to social media. The blog was meant to provide updates on research and news items related to the topic. The wiki was designed to provide an archive of resources people can use to make a case against blocking in their organizations.

There has been plenty of evidence to add to the wiki which I have neglected. For example, there’s the University of Melbourne study proving a 9% productivity increase among workers allowed to use social media at work. Or there’s the BizInfo/Blackline study that revealed 65.3% of business professionals claiming that web 2.0 services help them to achieve business objectives and 78.1% who believe social media increases collaboration among employees.

I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on this blog and over at StopBlocking.org. I’ve catalogued and attempted to debunk the reasons companies implement blocks. None of them hold water in light of the evidence of the real business benefits that accrue to organizations that prudently allow their employees access to the Net. I could go review all of these, but this post is already running long enough.

I will add the latest studies to the wiki. I will cross-posting this item to the blog. And I am committed to getting back to maintaining the blog. But I need your help.

What can you do?

• Send me resources—When you find a study or survey that either related to employee use of social media, blocking access, corporate policies or anything else that helps build the body of knowledge, please send it my way.
• Link to StopBlocking.org—The only way this initiative will build into a movement is if it’s visible.
• Put the badge on your blog—There are several versions available.
• Share success stories—Blog about the benefits of access to an open web in the workplace, and let me know so I can link to your posts.
• Make the case—Use the information at StopBlocking.org to make a solid business case for open access in your organization.