Socialcast

Note: This is an entry in a series of blog posts written about entering and the workforce as a member of Gen Y. These posts focus on Socialcast intern Margo Consul’s first-hand experience in a social-media-rich landscape that shapes the way new employees interact with their colleagues and customers

I spend hours every day reading news about how to use social media and all the ramifications (positive and negative) that come with it.  Social media is evolving quickly and it has been a challenge not only for myself, but also for most Gen Y employees to learn what is acceptable to post and what isn’t.  Where do you cross the line between personal and professional – or is there really even a line?

Recent social media scandals show that people often forget that the world is watching everything they do when it is on the Internet. The infamous “Cisco Fatty” incident showed just how much employers are watching social media outlets for anything and everything involving their company. Tweeting about how much you are going to hate the work of a job you just got hired to do is the quickest way to lose it.  It’s a dose of reality that new employees have to learn – you’re being watched online.

To some degree, employees are to companies what athletes are to sports teams. Recently, athletes have been causing quite a stir with inappropriate tweets; as people who are always in the spotlight, it is surprising what they are putting out on the web.

Minnesota Vikings’ Bernard Berrian recently tweeted about a teammate spraining a knee ligament at practice and that he would be out for the rest of the season. The player then tried to cover his tracks and tweeted that his teammate would return in a few games. However, he had exposed his teammate by announcing his injury over Twitter for opponents to exploit and for the media to write about. How is this any different than a corporate employee tweeting about his or her own company’s proprietary information? Social media provides an outlet for fans to get close to celebrities, but as “Cisco Fatty” found out, anyone can be a celebrity via social media. Just like professional athletes, corporate employees must be cautious about what they tweet.

Although this sounds like a public relations nightmare, it’s not. In my time at Socialcast, I’ve learned that there are ways to use social media properly and a way to use it poorly. The more word-of-mouth buzz there is about a company, the more recognizable the brand, and the more people will watch their social media activity.  Shaquille O’Neal has over 1.8 million followers on Twitter. He spends his time tweeting about anything and everything. During basketball season, Shaq created intense excitement by tweeting during halftime of Cavaliers games. He got people to watch him by using Twitter – just as companies like Socialcast hope to engage customers using Social media.

So what have I learned? I have learned that anyone can gain attention using social media. People are watching all the time, and the idea of private versus work life has disappeared as social media becomes more prevalent in the workplace. However, with the incoming workforce being well versed in social media, companies and sports teams alike cannot shy away from social media out of fear. They should educate themselves on how to use the sites properly so that they can take full advantage of the public platform that social media provides.

Socialcast is always open to user feedback, and this week, many of the features we have released are in response to requests by users to improve their Socialcast experience. If you have feedback, questions, or ideas, follow us on Twitter for a quick response to your thoughts.

What You Requested:

Tag Cloud: Socialcast has released a tag cloud for each community. Tags are highly important as they indicate trends in user-generated content, giving real-time insight into the pulse of the community. The top 100 tags in each network will be available and weighted with five tiers of use. Access the tag cloud as a drop down menu under the “Share” box.  Clicking on a tag filters your stream to include all of the posts including that tag. You can use the tag filter in combination with the message type and category filters, allowing you to create a robust, personalized search.

Invite New Members to a Group and the Network: Several users reported that they wanted to invite fellow employees to specific groups, but when those employees weren’t members of the overall network, this couldn’t happen. We’ve made it possible for you to now invite a person who isn’t a member of the network into a group and the network in one quick form. Your colleague will receive an activation email to join the network as well as your group.

Hide Private Groups: Private Groups are now only visible to the members of the Group and are no longer listed in the Groups directory. This has been a highly sought-after feature, allowing truly private conversations about the business to happen discreetly with appropriate members only.

Delete Groups: Group creators can now delete an entire group, removing all messages and the avatar from the Group directory.

API: Last week, we released our Socialcast API. The Socialcast API includes a robust set of operations to interact with your company’s messages. We encourage developer feedback and questions. If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit our API developer support group or contact us at support@socialcast.com

If you have started developing any clients on our API, let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

We’re very excited to announce the official release of the Socialcast Developer API. After several weeks of deployment to beta clients, it is now officially available to every Socialcast network.

The Socialcast API includes a robust set of operations to interact with your company’s stream messages.  Documentation and command line examples for how to interact with the API can be found by logging into your community, clicking on “Tools” in the top navigation bar, and then “integrate with the Socialcast developer API” at the bottom of the list.

Our own Socialcast desktop application is built with the Socialcast API, and we hope that our clients will enjoy creating their own applications that fit into their company’s workflow and needs.  

We encourage developer feedback and questions. If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit our API developer support group or contact us at support@socialcast.com

This morning, Twitter was experiencing a denial-of-service attack that affected its API. Therefore, until the issue is fixed, your Socialcast community will not be importing your tweets. Once Twitter has recovered from this issue, Socialcast will again be able to import your Twitter feed. Thanks for your patience!

For updates on Twitter’s service, visit their Status page.

UPDATE: As of Monday, August 10, 2009, Socialcast’s Twitter integration is fully working again.

The Socialcast office has been abuzz with lots of new feature development this week. Both of our recent major updates began with a dialogue about customer needs several months ago. We’re pleased to have been able to understand the business challenges our customers faced to be able to create Socialcast features that would help alleviate them.

What’s New

Broadcast Message Feature: As we announced last week, this new feature allows company leadership to send time-sensitive and critical information to the community immediately. Broadcast Messages appear highlighted in the live stream and are accompanied by an email alert with the URL to send members directly to the message.

According to Marcia Connor and Bill Ives from Pistachio Consulting, “This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email.” Read their full blog post about this feature’s implications for enterprise microblogging here.

What You Requested

List View:  We recognize that some messages can dominate a stream’s real estate with comments. Therefore, this new viewing option condenses the information if desired, allowing you to grab a high level overview of conversations without all of the comments. More details can be found on our blog post about this view.

Did You Know:

Did you know that the on-demand version of Socialcast is completely free to use and administer for unlimited users? Other vendors are charging $3 per user, per month for features such as exporting your messages, adding non-employees to the network, and creating a custom usage policy. These are free services with Socialcast. Try us out and see what you think!

Today, Socialcast launched an updated interface that allows you to select either an expanded or list view of each of your streams. Now, you’ll have the option of viewing messages the way that you prefer - either in an expanded manner (with all comments appearing as threaded automatically) or in a list-like manner (where only the initial message appears, and comments can be accessed by manually expanding the thread).

The expanded view is a great way to read entire conversations and understand the context in which they’re discussed.

The list view makes it simple to quickly take stock of the main topics in the network, taking up less real estate on your screen to provide you with high-level details. You can still expand this view to read comments, or simply hover over a user avatar to see what he or she has written.

You can toggle between these views by clicking on the list icon at the top left corner of your stream. 

We’re interested in how you like these new views - so email us at carrie@socialcast.com to give your feedback!

Note: This is an entry in a series of blog posts written about entering and the workforce as a member of Gen Y. These posts focus on Socialcast intern Margo Consul’s first-hand experience in a social-media-rich landscape that shapes the way new employees interact with their colleagues and customers.

As a new employee to the workforce, it seems to me that there’s a sizeable group of employees that has been hesitant about using social media at work.  I think that it’s the word “social” that seems to imply that these methods of communication have no intrinsic value. So, I propose a challenge to those that are still hesitant towards using social media:

Don’t focus on the term “social,” - focus on the instant communication and the consistent flow of information that these sites make available so you can do your job better.

My parents have always had a conservative approach to social media, and I believe that there are many with their viewpoint today. Like any concerned parent, my mom took to heart the stories about online predators out to get her kids and cyber-bullying. My dad was always concerned about privacy and putting too much information on the Internet. These are the tainted images that many people still have about social media.

I didn’t understand the negative perceptions of the social websites when they were first gaining popularity; to me they were a way to communicate with my friends on multiple levels. I could send them messages, share photos of us and always be clued into what they were thinking by reading their blogs. What we talked about wasn’t necessarily of great importance, but the sites provided a way to connect faster and use less effort than email.

Recently, I have learned that yes, these sites are social, but you can manipulate them to be more than just a place to post photos and pass the time. I have used the status update box in Facebook as a way to ask general questions about events at Santa Clara or tips for finding articles for a research paper. The question is broadcasted to a much larger network than your closest friends. I do the same thing at work inside our Socialcast community when I need help with a project.

I have also used the update box as a way to draw attention to accomplishments I want people to see. I attach links to my recent articles in the school paper or my newest blog post.  Down the road, archiving these will help me show future employers my portfolio over time.

Turn these techniques on their head and companies and their employees can use them to announce a new product, get instant feedback by asking for suggestions and post links to their websites. The ideas of exchanging information over time, space, knowing what people are thinking, reading, working on and always being connected is at the root of the social media phenomenon.  Few can argue that this isn’t a benefit at work. To the naysayers, I urge you to use these platforms as a way to connect faster, gain information, and communicate better with those around you – you will become quickly adept and enthralled as long-time users like me.