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

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Blogging and Other Social Media: Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 6, pp. 474-476. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011053995

In recent years Gower has published some useful books on business online knowledge. A quick visit to its website will allow visitors to identify works like Peter Sammons's Buying Knowledge, Niall Cook's Enterprise 2.0 (on social software and the workplace), Steve Manton's Integrated Intellectual Asset Management and Andrew Sparrow's Music Distribution and the Internet. These all have a clear business emphasis, and intended readership, and they share this position with Blogging and Other Social Media: Exploiting the Technology and Protecting the Enterprise. This states that it “is aimed at both organizations that already use social media and those considering the matter for the first time”.

Library and information practitioners, then, are likely to regard this new book as eligible for shelves supporting business information and knowledge management courses in academe. It will also be useful for any manager, above all in a small firm, exploring Web 2.0 technology, and its business application Enterprise 2.0, with a view to deciding how and why to move ahead. The book examines blogs and blogging, as it says, and includes in the term “social media” things like wikis and podcasts, social networking and bookmarking. By now, all these have been widely covered in the literature, and so potential purchasers will want to know what this book contributes to it.

Its recurring theme is that of the business application – implications for business, opportunities for business – and, by that token, where familiar items like wikis and social networking sites are discussed, the authors take time and trouble to separate out the incentives for business to use such social media. These incentives usually hinge around promotion and marketing, contact and interaction with customers and clients, gaining market information for analysis for decision‐making, and, in some cases, content dissemination and retrieval. Accepting that readers will vary in experience, the authors describe blogs and the rest in down‐to‐earth ways, offering plus and minus arguments for using particular blogs and social media, naming names, identifying the technical factors you need to take account of, and providing examples (and some legal cases) where appropriate.

The final section of four deals with the legal aspects of blogs and social media, with a helpful snapshot of copyright and trade marks (blogs present problems for collaborative intelligence and third‐party content), defamation (with tricky issues of ISP liability, conduit status and innocent dissemination), privacy and data protection (real risk issues here for enterprises since data subjects can so easily be identified by text and image in blogs and social media), employment law (case law has revealed some tensions for employers and employees here), and the whole related field of online reputation and brand management. For anyone keen on this legal side, the legal blogs or blawgs are particularly informative. The three main authors are commercial lawyers and the first two are involved with a legal blog called Impact. They say enough here to identify what law is relevant (including the jurisdictional dilemma) and hint at how legal interpretation is shifting. Very much a moving target. The law chapter itself was written by the Technology and Commerce team of the firm Mill & Reeve, authors of the well‐known Naked Law blog (required reading for wonks).

Going back over the whole book, however, the case is made that business enterprises cannot ignore blogs and social media. A rather awkward third section contains a short series of chapters on the wider picture, not really needed at all here, except for two very apt features – specifics on companies that actually do things (for instance, IBM and Mitre both use social bookmarking and collaborative filtering, and Lucent uses social tagging for navigation of library content) and a vivid case study of social groupware at the law firm Allen & Overy.

Elsewhere there is an even more intriguing case study of how Field Fisher Waterhouse have developed a virtual world presence in Second Life.

The meat of the book, apart from the legal material at the end, lies in identifying the blogs, wikis, podcasting, social networking and other services and products (up‐to‐date for a book compiled between 2007 and 2008) and, even more helpful, a for‐and‐against analysis of most of them for the business reader. Typically, on blogs, examples like IPKAT the intellectual property blog, links between blogs and search engines, creating a blog, free and fee blogs, blogging platforms, and is it worthwhile for a business (the title of chapter five). The answer to the last question is yes – for information distribution and retrieval, marketing and profile‐raising, networking and revenue‐generation. There is a sub‐plot throughout on cost and revenue, a side of things worth developing into yet another book.

Turning to social media, the authors pick out LinkedIn as a useful business network, advise on ways businesses can use social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube, recommend visiting podcasting services like Out‐Law, and explain what social bookmarking sites (such as Delicious and Digg) have to offer. Some come out better than others, and, given the signposting in this book, the business reader can visit the sites and make up his/her own mind. Social media aggregators like Profilactic pull together online content and present their own opportunities and risks. Risk and liability, while not overly negative themes here, are rightly present in the book. One of the most obvious messages of the book is to get involved. Another is that today's business cannot ignore blogs and social media, particularly if they want to sell products and services to people under 35 years old.

What the authors have done here is gather together a helpful body of information and advice for the busy manager (not necessarily the IT expert, and certainly not the information professional as such). Its selection of products and services are all worth investigating more fully and weighing up in similar ways for suitability to the company's needs and plans. Inevitably there is some going back over familiar ground – what is a blog and a wiki, what are principles of data protection, and so forth – but the less familiar content justify the price and the purchase. That said, this is a fast‐moving field and the book is likely to date quickly.