Enterprises realizing the value of Social Networking

I had an interesting meeting with a
customer last week regarding the use of social networking. This is a large
broker dealer with several thousand financial advisors across the country.

The IT department is getting
pressure from the business users to allow the use of Facebook, LinkedIn and
Twitter all of which they currently block. When I asked them why the business
units wanted access to these sites, they gave me three
reasons:

1. The financial advisors
   are telling them that referrals they get through Facebook and LinkedIn tend to
   convert to clients at a much higher rate than any other channel. This resonated
   with me – at FaceTime we constantly remind our salespeople to leverage their
   social networks for prospecting. It is well know that human beings are tribal by
   nature and are more likely to respond to someone who is “connected” to them in
   someway – even when you have millions of connections!
2. Their marketing group
   is focused on the 35-45 year old demographic since this is where people hit the
   peak of their earning power and start thinking about financial planning. Getting
   clients in their late thirties means you can hang on to them 20-30 years. Turns
   out that the over-35 demographic is the fastest growing user group at Facebook
   and the largest segment for both LinkedIn and Twitter.
3. Finally, the company is
   finding that their ability to recruit at college campuses and MBA schools is
   enhanced by their Facebook and Twitter presence. As we all know, college kids
   live with these technologies and businesses that block access are seen as old
   school.

I am hearing similar reasons from
other customers across all industry groups. Enterprises are recognizing the
power of social networking to recruit new customers, stay in touch with existing
customers and enhance communication with their employee base.

Of course there are several
challenges that need to be overcome. In a survey FaceTime conducted in June of
this year, organizations identified their top three concerns as content leakage,
regulatory and corporate compliance and reputation
damage.

“I am not worried about the guy who
wants to steal information” the IT manager at a large services firm said to me.
“I am worried about mistakes. People don’t realize that competitors can also see
your status update on LinkedIn and if you’re talking about working on a
particular project, you’ve just told the world.” The inadvertent leakage of
content is a common concern among the security managers I speak
with.

On the compliance front, regulatory
authorities are increasingly focusing on the use of these networks within
regulated industries such as financial services, energy and healthcare. For
example, FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, recently
formed a Social Networking Task Force to look into the compliance challenges posed by social
networking sites.

Finra CEO Rick Ketchum said, at the SIFMA Annual Meeting “Social networking
sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn provide new ways to connect, inform and
interact with customers… They also raise new regulatory challenges. For example,
as currently designed they may not allow you to archive and maintain the
communications on your own books and records.”

 

Reputation damage is another concern
for large enterprises. How do you track what employees and customers are saying
about your company? The CIO of an electric utility company noted that they used
Twitter to communicate information about outages and other emergencies to their
customer base. “I worry that a disgruntled employee or customer could hijack our
Twitter account and start spreading
misinformation”.

 

Another customer, a large bank that
ran into some problems integrating an acquisition, talked about how customers
were blasting the bank on Facebook and Twitter. “Because we block the use of
these sites within our company, we were caught off-guard and didn’t understand
how we should respond to these comments.” The IT manager noted. “Our marketing
group is now formulating a strategy on how to leverage these platforms. We need
to be more savvy about these channels.”

 

Notwithstanding the challenges, it
is clear that enterprises recognize the value of these sites and are motivated
to overcome them. (Shamefaced sales pitch follows) FaceTime recently announced
USG 3.0
which
is designed to address these challenges and allow enterprises to leverage the
benefits of social networking.

 

I would be interested in hearing
your views on the use of social networking in your business. Do you agree with
the above reasons? Are there other reasons?

Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing and Employee Productivity

A study released last week by the University of Melbourne’s Department of Management and Marketing maintains that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t.

 

Well, that’s good news for the 51 percent of workers who access social networking sites at least once a day while at work – not to mention the 50 percent that check their Facebook pages and the 69 percent that watch videos on YouTube several times a day, according to FaceTime’s Collaborative Internet Survey published last fall.

 

 

The University’s Dr. Brent Cocker says:

 

“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”

 We couldn’t agree more. The whole blocking strategy just doesn’t seem to work in the real world.

 

At the same time, the results of the Melbourne study directly contrast some news that broke in the UK this last week – where students at Bournemouth University have been complaining that they can’t get work done because other students are hogging University computers to use Facebook and Twitter.

 

Visibility into what employees (and students in this case in Bournemouth) are accessing, is crucial not just to an effective IT security approach, but also it seems to ensuring productivity. If you don’t know that 69 percent of your workforce is watching YouTube, how will you know that’s the cause of your bandwidth spikes? What if you could give them a bandwidth allotment for such activities, and when their quota is reached, its bye bye water skiing squirrel videos?

 

It sounds like the folks at Bournemouth Uni’s IT team could do with not just controlling the bandwidth taken up by some students, but also the time that they’re allowed to be on Facebook!

 

Watch this space for upcoming announcements about gaining greater visibility into what’s really happening within corporate and organizational networks.

Maybe Perception is NOT Reality after all

Your employees really are on Facebook at work, trust me. And they’re on more than 400 other social networking sites as well. Ok, if you’re one of the companies that blocks the Facebook.com domain you may be saving your company a bit in terms of employee productivity, but from a security standpoint it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

 

During fourth quarter 2008, FaceTime collected live traffic data from more than 80 mid to large commercially deployed networks worldwide, representing the daily Web-based activities of more than 100,000 corporate workers. In parallel, a large sample of IT managers were surveyed on a variety of topics, including how many Web 2.0 applications they believed were in use on their networks. One-third estimated the number at less than eight.

 

In reality, FaceTime’s actual network traffic data shows an average of 49 Web 2.0 applications installed in each of the 80 reporting locations. These applications include social networking (with Facebook topping the list), instant messaging, Web-based IM, streaming media, IPTV, P2P file sharing, Web conferencing, VoIP and anonymizers. 

 

	IT Estimates (Survey)	FaceTime Actual Tracking Data
Instant Messaging	66%	100%
Web based IM	35%	97%
Streaming Audio/video	80%	94%
IPTV	10%	100%
P2P File Sharing	54%	96%
Web Conferencing	82%	83%
Social Networking	60%	100%
VoIP	40%	100%
Anonymizers	15%	74%

 

What’s an anonymizer you say? For users whose employers block Facebook.com – or gambling or porn sites – it’s a godsend. Where there’s a will, there’s a way – but there’s also a solution for IT to regain control.

 

Yes, I believe that in reality most IT managers know that Web 2.0 is pervasive in their networks – but what I don’t think they really have a handle on is what employees are doing with these applications on a day-to-day basis. And that’s worth understanding.

 

We’ll be looking more at what’s really going on in corporate networks over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

White House says yes to email, no to IM. Change doesn’t have to be this hard.

It looks as if the decision has been made, President Barack Obama will be allowed to keep his Blackberry. Politico’s Ben Smith reports incoming white house staffers were told last Friday that, indeed, the President would remain connected – but for them the news was not so bright. There will be no IM in the White House, and that’s a change that the white house staffers are not ready for.

 

This is an interesting policy, since Web 2.0 and real time communications have played such a significant role in the Obama campaign.

 

According to Smith:

 

“They just told us flat out we couldn’t IM in the White House,” groused one senior staffer Friday.

“It sucks. It’s really going to slow us down,” complained another, saying that lawyers had warned that, along with instant messaging, White House software will restrict users to a range of sites roughly “like your average grade school.” 

 

At the heart this debate is The Presidential Records Act, which requires White House documents to be made publicly available five years after a president leaves office. The White House will obviously be archiving its emails to comply. But why stop there? After all, in many ways IM is really just instant email. For more than seven years now, corporations have embraced the benefits of IM and solved the compliance issues around storing and retrieving its content.

   

In defense of the White House IT staff, even though IM seems like instant email to its users, its very different from a management standpoint. Instead of one email network under IT’s control, there are dozens of different IM networks in play where conversations occur in real time and involve any number of parties.  It’s like solving a Rubics Cube as opposed to a flat picture puzzle – it can be done, but it’s a bit more complicated.

 

For example, a multi-party IM conversation can include numerous participants joining at different times, creating a requirement to make clear the context surrounding each participant’s understanding of the conversation. Who entered at what point, what did they hear and what did they say?

 

Or in terms that became familiar during the Watergate scandal, which was the catalyst for the adoption of the Presidential Records Retention Act, “Who knew what, and when?”

 

The technology exists to solve these problems, so my guess is that’s not all that’s behind the decision. IM conversations are by their nature casual, more like hallway conversations. So the fear is that if IM is archived, one day those walls will talk and the result may be embarrassing. Remember Mark Foley?

 

But Corporate America has dealt with this issue as well, and the White House could do the same. Employee education goes along way, along with proactive technology solutions like setting policies and real-time notifications to appear during their instant message conversations to let them know they are being monitored. If you tell the White House staffers they’re being monitored, I’m guessing they will use IM appropriately – no more or no less than they would with email. How often do you go over the speed limit when a Highway Patrol car is in the next lane?

 

Change. If anyone can do it, this administration can.

Facebook at Work: The Top Ten Applications

I’m spending the quiet time during the holidays working with my colleagues on FaceTime’s end-of-year analysis of how real-time communications, social media, other Web 2.0 applications – and the malware using these channels – have affected organisations over the last 12 months. We’ll release the full results next week, but I wanted to share some early insights.

 

This year, for the first time, we collected real-world data taken from our Unified Security Gateway appliances deployed across more than 60 participating global organisations. These companies have opted into a program that sends data back to us, so we can analyze Internet application traffic.

 

So what did we learn?

 

Facebook represented the largest single Web 2.0 destination that we tracked, hands down. Maybe not a big surprise, but what I find compelling is that only about one percent of attempts to access Facebook were blocked. It shows that our customers are forward thinking companies that view the use of social networks as positive to their business environment – 99 percent of Facebook visits were allowed by IT policy.

 

These particular employees accessed 890 different Facebook applications over the past few months. Here are the Top Ten applications that were used during working hours on our customers’ networks.

 

1.      Facebook Chat (messaging)

2.      Private Photo Gallery (photo, dating)

3.      Wordscraper (gaming)

4.      Do Not Remember (drinking)

5.      Word Twist (gaming)

6.      Are YOU Interested? (dating)

7.      Bumper Sticker (just for fun)

8.      MindJolt Games (gaming)

9.      Slide FunSpace (messaging)

10.  (Lil) Green Patch (gaming)

 

(Sadly my favourite, WordBubble, didn’t make the Top Ten)

 

This is by no means a statistically relevant sample of the world as a whole, but the data gives us a indication of what’s really happening out there in the Web 2.0 world. And it supports the findings from our annual Collaborative Internet study: The lines between employees’ work and personal lives are increasingly blurred, and employees feel they have a right to download – or access – whatever they choose on their work computers. (I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable working for a company that didn’t let me do this!)

 

Scarily I have two FashionWars invitations outstanding, as I write this – one of them from a seriously unfashionable, tech geek friend.  Si, you’re scaring me. Please don’t do this online, you know neither of us understands Jimmy Choos and the like…

New Research: Tracking security incidents against a growing use of collaborative Internet applications

For the fourth consecutive year, FaceTime has commissioned a survey of IT managers and end users to track the use of Internet-based applications – things like IM, Skype, P2P, social networking and other Web 2.0 apps. We also surveyed employee attitudes toward use of those applications and their impact on IT and the organization in terms of security, data leakage and compliance.

 

As in prior years, the research was conducted among a large sample of corporate IT managers and end users across all size organizations in North America, UK and Europe. The research study includes compiled data from more than 500 IT managers and end users. The results are quite revealing.

 

 

 

• Use of consumer oriented Internet applications has reached 97% of organizations, up from 85% in 2007 and, on average, companies report 9.3 applications in use by its employees on the enterprise network
• 73% of IT managers report at least one security incident as a result of Internet application usage; Viruses, Trojans and worms (59%) are most common, followed by spyware (57%) for a close second
• 37% of companies report an instance of non-compliance; 27% report accidental data leakage
• IT managers report an average of 34 incidents per month, and the largest companies project $125K monthly to remediate Internet usage related security, compliance and data leakage issues
• 51% of end users access social media sites at least once per day and  79% of employees use social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, You Tube) at work for business reasons
• Sixty-eight percent of IT managers have archiving and retrieval methods for corporate email. About half that many–31 percent–store IM communications. One in four has copies of audio conferences (25%), while slightly fewer (20%) archive corporate Web conferences
• If requested by corporate attorneys to reproduce IM communications–in the event of a lawsuit, for example–51 percent of IT managers could not do it. Thirty-eight percent because they have no such capabilities and 13 percent could do it but not in any practical time frame
• Unified Communications suites exist at about 29 percent of IT respondent organizations. Ten percent have deployed pilots to a limited number of users, while 19 percent have deployed UC for the majority of their endusers

We’ll be delving into various aspects of this exhaustive survey in the coming weeks, to break down just what this data is telling us about what’s happening on corporate networks and what it means to both IT managers and end users.

A world without Twitter

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Rafe Needleman wrote on C|Net recently about 11 troubled Web companies and he put
Twitter at the top of his list. Twitter – my outstanding favorite of online
social media tools – I had to catch my breath.

 

Commenting
on these tough economic times Needleman shares what investors are saying…we’re
going to lose some good companies, audience love is no guarantee for success, and
profitability and a solid business model are still required. Of course. But death
for Twitter? True, there are other online applications I use that also made the
list – Skype (my preferred IM client), Netvibes (my preferred RSS reader), and
Pandora (my preferred destination for listening to music online) – but I think
I could get by without them. Or at least I’d make the effort.

 

The micro-blogging site of 140 character text-only posts has become my defacto source for
instant information. And for others as well. As Paul
‘Twitter is the New Blog‘ Boutin at Wired Magazine says you’ll find some heavy
hitters there – Scoble, Calacanis, and many, many others – claiming it’s
because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts
can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.

 

I’m not sure I’d say Twitter will completely
replace the blog, but it’s clear that individuals and businesses alike have
found a place on Twitter. Companies are successfully using it to provide timely
information to customers and prospects, subject matter experts are able to
share their wealth of information, and individuals share
stream-of-consciousness tidbits about their personal lives…admittedly the latter
holds less value, but it can be entertaining!

 

So if I’m
feeling this way about Twitter, I have to assume other people might be feeling
the same about their favorite social media and Web applications, and they’re likely
using them at work, demanding IT managers pay attention to what’s in use and
secure the environment.

 

FaceTime recently
completed our annual survey among IT managers and end users for their opinions
on what Internet applications are in use at work and why. I look forward to
seeing what applications and trends top the list this year – it never fails to
reveal some interesting things. We’re releasing the report on Monday, so be
sure to check back then.

 

In the
meantime, you might review Needleman’s full list – how many do you think are in
use at your company? Are there any you personally couldn’t live without? Or, like
me with Twitter, might cry a little inside if they were to disappear?

Enterprise productivity collaboration software gets a “face” lift

Most people would agree, and Robert Scoble probably said it best, enterprise software isn’t sexy. In fact, I’d understand if the words “extensible enterprise productivity suite” put you to sleep.

 

But what if I said a game-changing Web 2.0 entrepreneur and his star engineer are leaving Facebook to launch an extensible enterprise productivity suite. Are you a little more interested?

 

You should be. Since Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein announced they were leaving Facebook earlier this month, a buzz has been swirling around the Valley, and everywhere else, about what’s next. Why leave Facebook? THE hot property. To outsiders it might seem like the logical path would be to simply expand Facebook with this new enterprise offering, but both have said moving Facebook off course would distract from the company’s mission (making the world more open through social software) and would not be good for the company. They claim the new project requires being built around a singular focus, “with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day 1.”

 

They also see the new venture as complimentary to Facebook. Using some of the same authentication technology and user experience modeling they hope the new products will become as familiar to people’s work life as Facebook.com is to their social lives.

 

Interesting. Do they mean to imply that Facebook is only meant for social/personal use? At FaceTime the only trend we see more than companies investing in enterprise collaboration and productivity suites, is that these applications are rarely just used for one purpose – business or personal – but for both. Another common trend…no one application rules the roost, enterprise-grade collaborative suites are deployed alongside consumer and other enterprise-class applications all of the time. And our customers continue to tell us this. Facebook has already been adopted by individuals and organizations for collaboration, networking and information sharing. I suspect it will remain in place as a tool for business, even as its extensible enterprise brother joins the family – one very large, loud family of big company competitors including Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, to name a few.  

 

This probably comes as no surprise, but seeing as FaceTime offers solutions that help manage and secure unified communications and collaborative suites, we like enterprise software. I’ll admit it’s not Angelina Jolie sexy, but it’s certainly not boring. I think it will be interesting to see what two guys with a consumer-based social networking background do for enterprise software and the collaboration market. If you’re questioning whether they hitched their wagons to the wrong star, you might consider what Hutch Carpenter had to say:

 

Rosenstein and Moskovitz are deeply ingrained at Facebook. They’ve been there for a while, and have seen it blossom as the go-to social network. They’ve were there for the heady valuation of $15 billion. The pre-IPO company still has work in front of it, but surely it’s pretty interesting.

So what do they do? They quit to go start a BORING enterprise software company.

What could this possibly tell us?

If you read the full post you’ll learn Carpenter’s with me on this one – enterprise software, not so boring. So what will the Rosenstein/Moskovitz decision tell us? I don’t know yet, but we’re listening.

And the winner is … Yammer

Take a look at the TechCrunch50 overall winner … Yammer. 

 

The company describes the application as “a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: What are you working on?“

 

Yammer is like Twitter with a business plan, and you could perceive the plan as one that ultimately holds companies hostage. Portfolio’s Tech Observer explains

 

“The service is free to employees, but companies pay to set up corporate accounts that give them the ability to manage their employees, remove users, and set passwords.” 

 

TechCrunch says

 

“if a company wants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay. It’s a brilliant business model.”

 

Not everyone agrees – here’s another view of the story.

 

From my point of view, Yammer is yet another example of employees going right past IT when they see an application they like, or one they feel they need to work more efficiently. Some call it the consumerization of IT. Whatever you want to call it, the wave of applications that employees bring to the workplace shows no signs of slowing.

What does Tom Brady have to do with employee productivity?

At the beginning of the season, Tom Brady was a top fantasy football league (FFL) draft pick. The guy can move his team downfield and put up points for an FFL team. But this all came to an “oh-my-god-you’ve-got-to-be-kidding” stop on Sunday when he went down with a year-ending knee injury in the first regular season game.  

 

Now what?  For millions of FFL managers the season is in jeopardy – not to mention serious bragging rights. Next step? Join the conversation and start thinking about a replacement for your QB position – even if it means doing it during “work hours.”

 

And, this is precisely why you should care – not you the football fan, but you the IT fan. Your employees are in the conversation.  Some are less concerned about their jobs and much more interested in solving their QB problem, and they’re using Web 2.0 tools to do it.

 

As I said a few months back in a post about March Madness, scenarios like this occur in organizations every day. And when employers block or put limits on what their employees can do, does it really solve the problem? For example, being overly aggressive with Web filtering controls can drive employees to install anonymizers designed to circumvent URL filtering. 

 

An estimated 19 million people in North America play fantasy football according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.  In the past 48 hours, more than 2500 Twitter messages (or “tweets”) were sent out regarding Tom Brady and his injury. In the same 48 hour period, nearly 800 individual blog posts were made referencing Tom Brady. Facebook has 225 fantasy sports applications available to its subscribers and over 500 groups alone for fantasy sports. There are countless others available on sports sites, Yahoo and other Web properties.

 

A recent study referenced by NBCSports suggested that fantasy football could result in as much as $500 million dollars of lost productivity per week.  I think we’d all agree that employees are capable of wasting time in several ways.  Talking on the phone to friends and smoke breaks are two that come to mind, so I’m not suggesting that if you lock down fantasy sports you’ve solved your productivity issues. 

 

In my opinion, online fantasy sports don’t cost American businesses a dime. In today’s work environment, some amount of personal, online activity is acceptable. However, IT professionals need to maintain visibility so they can make decisions about what should be controlled and to what level it should be controlled. 

 

Is it time for HR to call an audible? After all, it’s not just a network or security issue any more. It’s a business issue and an employee morale issue – and I wonder if HR may have to help re-write the playbook?