P.Y.O.P (Protect Your Online Privacy)

With the "buzz" in Google Buzz being more of an outcry on privacy violations, I thought I should look into the topic of social media and privacy.

Beginning with Facebook, social media has has had to walk a prickly line between enabling content sharing and respecting users' privacy. Even as we share more and more with each other, there are still a lot of us users, who prefer to have control over who can gain access to things such as Friend Lists, Wall Posts and Comments. I am definitely one of them.

A recent class discussion alerted me to the fact that the security and privacy I had been naive enough to take for granted on Facebook, were not as secure as I had imagined. At the very least, it is worth looking into the privacy policy of any social media application that you use; the equivalent of reading the fine print.

Here is a useful list of ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know, published by the website, All Facebook.

Moving Communications Forward (while looking good)...

On February 25, 2010, I attended the IABC presentation, Communications in a 2.0 World, featuring speaker Steve Crescenzo. Steve was billed a top-rated speaker, whose YouTube interviews conveyed a confident and knowledgeable professional. I have to add ‘humorous’ to that description.

I took a chance on IABC’s endorsement, and took the subway to Sutton Place Hotel on that cold and snowy night. I was not disappointed. Steve was entertaining, informative and refreshingly honest. The topic of his 1.5 hr presentation was how to spice up internal communications. He pretty much laid down the law in saying that either internal communicators catch the interactive, participative communications boat, or risk losing their audiences. I have captured the main points below.

7 Tips for improving online content:
1. Follow the 3-30-3-30 rule
3 seconds – write a great headline (one that tells the reader what the article is about)
30 seconds – if the reader is hooked by the headline, they will tackle the summary paragraph
3 minutes – if a reader cares about the topic, they will read the story
30 minutes – a really interested reader will read and watch more about the topic, rate the content, post comments etc.
As a communicator, your job is to provide content for all these levels of readers and make it compelling enough for people to get to the 30-minutes stage.

2. Showcase your personal talents – and help the org meet its goals. Social media demands personalities. Communicators can do their own podcasts (featuring CEO interviews, managers etc) and showcase their personalities.

3. Come down from 30,000 feel (high-level perspective)
Most leaders should not blog, as they do not have a personalized writing style. If you must get a leader to write, force them to get specific by giving concrete examples of what they mean.

4. Put people in every story
Corporate Communications used to be about 3 P’s – Policy, Program and Procedures. Add “people” to that. Make sure that all content includes multimedia and people.

5. Report from the field whenever possible – ex. Molson at the Olympics

6. Make your content about the audience
2.0 is about the conversation and the audience should feel like they’re being heard. Otherwise, don’t do social media at all.

7. Become a talent scout – Find the creative voices in your organization and make them heard.