Blogging and Other Social Media: Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise

Citation

Lomas, E. (2009), "Blogging and Other Social Media: Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise", Records Management Journal, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 248-250. https://doi.org/10.1108/09565690910999238

While the social media revolution has completely transformed the way we relate as individuals, most workplaces have lagged heavily behind. Even as social networks, blogging, cloud computing and the rest redefine every aspect of our lives as consumers and gregarious animals, Enterprise 2.0 has struggled to be born. The reasons are many – the conservative, top‐down structure of knowledge‐management departments, the risk‐averse nature of technology teams, an anxiety on the part of human resource and communications departments to open up their business to an unpredictably creative workforce.

The revolution is happening nevertheless, driven by the online behaviour of employees in their personal lives. Blogging and Other Social Media attempts to explore the different technologies, opportunities and challenges presented by social media to businesses of all sizes.

The text is structured in four parts. The first addresses blogging as a tool for information distribution, marketing, profile‐raising and networking. The emphasis is on practical help – how to create a blog and how to market it, with links to useful tools and sites.

Part two looks at social media – professional networks, consumer‐oriented media, virtual worlds, wikis, online office applications, social bookmarking. It tries to cover so many tools that it tends towards an inventory, summarising products' core functionality without examining them in any depth.

The third part addresses some of the applications of the previously examined technologies. This provides some of the most relevant and interesting content in the book, but is also the briefest section, with only two case studies and “10 Tips for Social Software Deployment in the Enterprise”.

The fourth part addresses some of the legal issues associated with blogging and use of social media. This plays to the authors' strong suit – they are lawyers by profession – and this has the most detailed and developed insights in the book. However, even in this area there are some notable gaps. For example, it would have been helpful to have a fuller discussion on the implications of using and reusing information under Creative Commons licences.

The legal chapters stand out in their level of expertise in contrast to the partial knowledge demonstrated of social media in the book as a whole. For example, the book suggests that using keywords frequently related to search engine optimisation (SEO) can enhance a blog's profile. This is true, but it would also have been advisable to highlight some of the subtleties and dangers of SEO – for example, use too many keywords and a search engine may interpret this as manipulation, which has a negative impact on search rankings.

Other examples of limited knowledge include the lack of information on business use of video and photo sharing sites. It highlights the benefits of some of the tools (p. 11, 42, 64 and p. 82) but only talks about the negative aspects in legal terms. It would have assisted the volume greatly if contributors with more practical or marcomms‐related insights into social media had helped to shape the first two sections of the book.

The book would also have benefited enormously from richer examples of how businesses have successfully implemented technologies. The authors allude to companies which have used certain tools successfully – Microsoft's use of a community of employee bloggers to create a more personal dimension to its brand, for example – and there are a number of cursory business profiles (mainly of professional service firms such as lawyers and IT companies), but there is little discussion of how these businesses made the transition internally, what issues arose, and how these challenges were practically overcome. How does one address differing security levels or the challenges around making data archivable for the long‐term? Too many examples were taken from Headshift, a social business consultancy, rather than the more traditional enterprises for who this book is surely intended.

On the plus side, the case study in chapter 17 is useful from a social networking perspective, although some of the detail is contained on a web link rather than in the body of the book. The methodology the authors carried out is clearly explained and would be useful for others wishing to carry out a similar experiment, even in a non‐legal context.

The act of publishing a book about blogging and social media is almost paradoxical – the use of social media is developing so quickly that as soon as a book on the subject is published, it is out of date. Even though it has apparently been developed on a wiki, the format feels very traditional and at odds with the content.

Part of the clumsiness is related to the multiple authorship – it doesn't quite fit together as a unified piece of thinking. The text does not flow and there are marked changes of style and content value throughout the whole. It is often unclear where the named authors are contributing, and editorial input seems to have been limited.

As an introduction to a completely new user of social media (though recent statistics suggest there are few to whom the concepts are still totally alien), the book is not without merit. However, its discussions, context and developed models are all too limited to provide a satisfactory guide to how businesses can successfully adapt to a world shaped by social media.

In summary – this was a missed opportunity, an ill‐conceived project. The legal chapters are well worth reading but the social media content is deficient. It is a classic example of the debate we need to have about why and when to publish in paper, as opposed to utilising the tools under discussion here. This should not have been an expensive book (£60) but an evolving web discussion.

1 A collaborative review

This book review was written collaboratively on a Wiki site and through e‐mail discussions by the “user” group (communication systems users and experts) of the Continued Communication research project: the project is analyzing how to maximise the business benefits of information created within computer mediated communications, taking into account the impact of the individual. The views represented within this review cannot be taken to be representative of any one individual within the group as the comments were evolved over time and in the case of the Wiki entered anonymously. All participants are taking part in the group in a personal capacity and are not representing the views of their employers. The members of the group are: Matthew Brown, Heather Caven, Nick Cooper, Denise Drake, Benjamin Ellis, Elizabeth Lomas, Morag Reavley, Tom Salmon, Katharine Stevenson, Andrew Stewart and 13 additional anonymised participants. This text has been edited by Elizabeth Lomas and Morag Reavley.