While the Marines are busy banning social media and some corporations are clamping down on Twitter and its ilk, the state government of California is encouraging its workers to embrace Web 2.0.

California officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

On Feb. 26, the state officially adopted the use of social media. But it’s hardly a Farmville free-for-all.

The state issued a policy that sets clear rules for its use, including a limitation to only authorized users who have been trained regarding their roles, responsibilities and security risks. (View a PDF of the policy here.)

The document states: “State agencies are encouraged to use social media technologies to engage their customers and employees. Many state entities, including the Governor, have used these communication channels with great success but as with most technologies, there is a measure of risk that must be addressed and mitigated.”

In addition to the policy, the state issued a five-page “Social Media Standard,” which includes a few interesting clauses (read the full document in PDF form here):

No. 8: “Users shall not utilize tools or techniques to spoof, masquerade, or assume any identity or credentials except for legitimate law enforcement purposes, or for other legitimate State purposes as defined in agency policy.”

No. 9: “Users shall avoid mixing their professional information with their personal information.”

And, No. 10: “Users shall not use their work password on social media web sites.”

Participating agencies must comply with the policy by July 1.

Related reading: “What We’re Reading: If  Harvard Says So Edition” | “Social Media: The Elephant in the Office”

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Jenny Sweeney Social Media California, CIO, FACEBOOK, Farmville, government, Social Media, the Marines, Twitter, YouTube

Two articles came across my desk recently that were not related, but read as if they could have been written as companion pieces under one headline. The first looked at how social networks — and the people who use them in particular — can transform the way we work; the other examined the growing focus on strong people skills in IT.

Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.

The two pieces together illuminate the shift that’s happening in IT. Help desks are replacing rudeness with customer care, and beginning to see their role as enabling employees to be more productive, rather than fixing computers that have caught fire. This new focus on soft skills goes hand in hand with discovering different, more effective ways of collaborating.

In the first article, which ran in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Cisco VP of enterprise Alan Cohen discusses how work has changed, from “local to global, from centralized to decentralized.” He mentions the significant investment in transaction systems, including ERP and e-mail, in the past decade to reduce business costs and redundancy. But those systems have had their run, and now it’s time for innovation and productivity to come from people themselves. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Customer Service, Social Media Alan Cohen, Cisco, Forbes, Fortune, Mike Schaffner

If you are still blocking your employees from using social media because you fear it will halt productivity, you’ve been reading the wrong research.

In an article published Nov. 11 in the Harvard Business Review, writers Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd make the case for the “uber-connected” organization of 2010. First, they assert, access to social media improves productivity. They point to the results of a study conducted by the University of Melbourne in Australia, which found that those who browse the internet for non-work-related purposes — within reason of course — are 9 percent more productive than their counterparts who don’t. (We wrote about this study when it was published in April. Read it here.)

Meister and Willyerd point to two other reasons companies should champion the use of social media: they maintain that the new workforce will seek out jobs that encourage the use of it, and add that companies that provide access to IM, Facebook, wikis, Twitter, etc. have more engaged workers.

If anything, keep this in mind: Those millennials… they “are prepared to bypass corporate IT departments if these tools are blocked.”

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Jenny Sweeney Social Media, This Week in Tech News, Worker Productivity Australia, Harvard, millennials

Last week’s two-hour Twitter outage was inconvenient for some, devastating to others. Whether it affected you at all is irrelevant; it proved that social media has become omnipresent.

I sure will be happy when it finally gets itself settled. Every day the media feeds us findings of new studies, fresh reports, and the latest arguments from industry experts about social media’s productivity-boosting power or time-sapping potential.

The outrage over the outage proved that social media matters.

Here are highlights from this week’s stories:

Marines: The Few, The Proud, The Banned
Last week also brought news of the United States Marine Corps banning sites like Twitter and Facebook on military networks. The Marines cited security concerns. We think they’re just too rigid to wrap their minds around the whole Web 2.0 mess.

CIO.com blogger C.G. Lynch responded to the Marine social media ban with a post urging other organizations not to follow the military’s lead. For organizations that don’t have national security at stake, he asserted, banning Twitter and the like is hasty. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Social Media FACEBOOK, productivity, Twitter, U.S. Marines

If you think Twitter, and social media in general, is a fad, think again. Not only has the number of unique visitors to Twitter increased exponentially in the past year, the percentage of people who use it only at work is double that of those who use it only at home.

According to a recent study by Nielsen Research, Twitter saw a 1,382 percent growth from February 2008 to February 2009*. What’s more, 62 percent of respondents said they access Twitter from work only; 35 percent access it from home only.

This is what we do know: Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and MySpace…) is wildly popular, and is used mostly at work. What’s unclear, however, is how to manage it in the enterprise.

Your options include ignoring it and blocking its use, or devising a plan that teaches employees how to use it without sullying your brand or exposing the company to security breaches. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Social Media CIO, FACEBOOK, LinkedIn, MySpace, Nielsen, productivity, Sophos, Twitter