Tag: YouTube

One in Two U.K. Companies Block Social Networking Web Sites

fulbright trends

Fulbright & Jaworski, the international law firm, just published their 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report. It is an independent survey of senior corporate counsel from a wide range of industry sectors.

About half of the respondents (52% of U.K. and 46% of U.S.) claim to block employees from accessing social networking Web sites. Two in five of all corporates (42%) block the most popular personal social networking sites (such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo) and 30% block business-related networking sites (LinkedIn and Plaxo). The YouTube web site is also blocked by more than a third of companies (37%).

Only 1/3 of the companies reported that they have no restrictions on access. Technology companies are the least likely to block social networking sites, with 56% of all tech companies saying they have no restrictions on such sites.

I found it interesting that 18% of U.K. companies have been asked to produce electronic information from such web sites as part of an electronic discovery request in legal proceedings.

Melanie Ryan, a Fulbright partner, commented, “For some businesses, networking sites can provide an efficient platform for keeping up-to-date with the latest developments and maintaining a profile in their industry. For those businesses that block access, such benefits are outweighed by the possible legal risks, including the inadvertent disclosure of confidential or proprietary information and the resulting claims or fines imposed by their regulators – not to mention, the security threat to their IT systems.”

But do they have a policy in place to let employees know what they should not be doing on these sites? Or are employees just doing those bad things at home or on their iPhone?

Blocking is not an effective policy.

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Social Media and Your Compliance Program

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Bill Piwonka, Amanda Mayhew and Rodica Buzescu from EthicsPoint gave a webinar on social media and compliance. These are my notes:

The presentation started with a user poll on the approach to social media at the attendees’ organizations:

  • 27% block all social media sites
  • 42% block a few social media sites
  • only 29% allow all social media sites

In a second question, I was surprised to see that 37% of the attendees said they were using some form of Web 2.0 in their ethics program. That seemed like a big number to me.

Bill started off with a brief discussion of his view of web 2.0 and social media. He also highlighted some of the approaches and tools used by EthicsPoint. He moved on to the need of companies to monitor their brand. It easy for customers, employees and competitors to craft your brand for you (and not in the way you want). You need to know what is being said and be prepared to respond when necessary.

On the call, 11% of the attendees did not use any social media platform, 11% used one, and 40% used 2 or three. The rest (like me) used more.

Why should compliance care about Social Media? It is here to stay. Generation Y and the Millennials grew up an learned in the world of social media. They enter business organizations and are cut off from the tools they used to learn and communicate.

Rodica took over and shared her perspective. She is new to EthicsPoint. When she started, she was cut off from her networks since they blocked Facebook, instant messaging and many other social media tools.

Amanda took over and gave her perspective as the general counsel and privacy officer at EthicsPoint. She pointed out that younger workers may not have been in the business environment long enough to realize that there are limits on what you can say outside the organization and inside the organization. EthicsPoint focuses on privacy and protection of their clients information. They have a tight policy on social media to protect that information.

Bill stepped up and pointed out that you cannot ignore social media. Even if you block access, employees can easily access them from a mobile device or home. Blocking is not an effective policy. You need to let your employees know what they can and cannot do. You need a policy. Bill used Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as an example.

Bill also pointed out that even if the company does not want to engage in social media, they need to monitor what is being said about your company in social media. You also want to make sure that someone else does not use your brand on social media platforms.

Amanda came back to emphasize a few points. It is important to make it clear what is confidential and what is not public. Another point was to be respectful, realizing that your mother, friends and boss may ready what you say. Anonymity is also a hot button for her.

What can you do? How can compliance professionals use Social Media?

Create a Facebook group for your compliance team. Allow people to see who you are and develop a relationship and trust.

Use YouTube to host and distribute training videos. Why buy expensive video hosting servers and software when YouTube will do it for free.

Best Buy uses a blog to make ethics a completely transparent dialogue.  Best Buy’s Chief Ethics Officer blogs on actual ethics and incidents at Best Buy. Of course, she does not use real names and disguises identifying information.

Use web 2.0 for professional development by joining online communities focused on ethics and compliance issues. EthicsPoint has user forums focused on its product.

In the Q&A there was a lot of discussion about how much to monitor and how much to limit. “Ignorance is not bliss.”

Another issue that came up in Q&A is who to friend on Facebook and who to make connections with on LinkedIn. In particular in the educational environment it is very tricky to friend or not friend. There is a similar dynamic in the workplace.

What about productivity? Does Facebook turn you into a slacker? Does blogging make you less useful? Bill turned this around and gave example of how he uses these tools as part of his job. (It was an impressive list.)

How do you develop your own policy? EthicsPoint started with Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as their model.  (You can also take a look at one of my models: Blogging / Social Internet Policy.)

(In the interest of disclosure some of the material was borrowed from my presentation on Social Media at the Boston EthicsPoint Regional User Forum in Boston. Bill also noted this in the presentation)

Bob Schiller’s Course on Financial Markets at Yale

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Yale University has published the lectures from its Economics 252 course on YouTube. There are 26 lectures from Robert Schiller and some of his guests during the Spring of 2008. (Yes, that Robert Schiller.) This ECON 252 course is one of several courses available from Open Yale. These are selected lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses that they make available to the public free of charge through the internet.

If you want to be effective at compliance, you need to understand how the financial markets work. These videos provide some great information, background, and theory on the financial markets.  (If only they were podcasts so I could watch and listed during the commute.)

ECON 252 Course Summary: Financial institutions are a pillar of civilized society, supporting people in their productive ventures and managing the economic risks they take on. The workings of these institutions are important to comprehend if we are to predict their actions today and their evolution in the coming information age. The course strives to offer understanding of the theory of finance and its relation to the history, strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century.

Each of the 26 seminars is 75 minutes. Here are the individual seminars.

1. Finance and Insurance as Powerful Forces in Our Economy and Society

2. The Universal Principle of Risk Management: Pooling and the Hedging of Risks

3. Technology and Invention in Finance

4. Portfolio Diversification and Supporting Financial Institutions

5. Insurance: The Archetypal Risk Management Institution

6. Efficient Markets vs. Excess Volatility

7. Behavioral Finance: The Role of Psychology

8. Human Foibles, Fraud, Manipulation, and Regulation

9. Guest Lecture by David Swensen

10. Debt Markets: Term Structure

11. Stocks

12. Real Estate Finance and its Vulnerability to Crisis

13. Banking: Successes and Failures

14. Guest Lecture by Andrew Redleaf

15. Guest Lecture by Carl Icahn

16. The Evolution and Perfection of Monetary Policy

17. Investment Banking and Secondary Markets

18. Professional Money Managers and Their Influence

19. Brokerage, ECNs, etc.

20. Guest Lecture by Stephen Schwarzman

21. Forwards and Futures

22. Stock Index, Oil and Other Futures Markets

23. Options Markets

24. Making It Work for Real People: The Democratization of Finance

25. Learning from and Responding to Financial Crisis I (Lawrence Summers)

26. Learning from and Responding to Financial Crisis II (Lawrence Summers)

Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon?

lawpracticemagazine

I recently had an article on Faceblocking published in the March 2009 issue of Law Practice magazine: Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon for Law Firms?

Steve Matthews and I conducted an informal poll to see if we could confirm that law firms were blocking access to social networking sites. Our theory was proven in the results. (You can download the raw survey data (.xls) if you want to see the underlying data.)

Of those responding to the survey, 45% said their firms blocked access to social networking sites. The three most blocked sites: Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Those are also 3 of the top 10 most visited sites on the web. We also published some of written comments from the survey respondents: Speaking Out on Social Networking.

The survey is very unscientific. Steve and I thought that it would be useful to get some data about what law firms are doing about access to social networking sites. I was surprised that 45% of firms blocked access to some social networking sites. Perhaps those working at firms subject to blocking were more likely to respond to the survey. I was also surprised that the 45% blocking percentage was fairly consistent across firm size. So small law firms were just as likely to block access as big firms.

I conducted two surveys of the summer associates at my old law firm, the vast majority went to Facebook at least once a day. It seems to me that if you are recruiting young workers, you should not cut off one of the ways they communicate. Deacons published a survey indicating that an employer’s policy regarding on-line social networking would influence a significant percentage of workers’ decision to join one employer over another.

Although I am an advocate of open access, I do so with the caveat that you need to let the people in your organization know what is proper use and to monitor their compliance. I fear that many firms use blockage as their policy. That may have worked 10 years ago, but not today. You can just as easily access these sites from iPhone or blackberry as you can from a firm computer. Blocking does not stop the bad behavior that it is trying to prevent. Blocking merely changes the access method.

There is a fair amount of research, the most prominent of which are two reports from McKinsey, showing that access to social networks at work, coupled with a good policy results in a more engaged, more motivated and potentially more innovative workplace. You should set sensible policies and set reasonable expectations for your employees. Social networking sites at their core are communications platform. You should be able to adapt your policies on email, confidentiality, marketing and similar policies to easily include social networking sites. If not, those other policies probably need updating anyhow.

See:

Video Inviting You To Help Fight Against Corruption

To mark the World Economic Forum’s International Anti-Corruption Day on Dec. 9, 2008, executives from companies in the Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative appear in this video inviting ideas on how to fight corruption.

Speaking in the the video are (in order of appearance) Peter Bakker, Chief Executive Officer, TNT, Netherlands; Alan L. Boeckmann, President and Chief Executive Officer, Fluor Corporation, USA; Samuel A. DiPiazza Jr, Chief Executive Officer, PricewaterhouseCoopers International, USA; and Richard OBrien, President and Chief Executive Officer, Newmont Mining Corporation, USA.

By becoming a PACI signatory, a company commits to a zero-tolerance policy towards bribery and corruption and agrees to put in place an internal anti-corruption programme that reflects the PACI Principles for Countering Bribery.