UpDate: Thursday 22st July 2010.

The world’s largest social networking site announced Wednesday that it has hit a widely anticipated milestone, signing up its 500 millionth user.

In a blog post, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he “could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago.” In a video message, Zuckerberg thanked Facebook users and told them “you really have created a worldwide movement.”

Congratulations Mr Zuckerberg. From idea to fruition. A milestone in anybodies language.

~~~~~~~ Previous Entry: ~~~~~~~~~~

Facebook is one of a kind in Social Networks. 6 months ago Twitter was one of a kind for the Social Media set. It seems 6 months is about the average time span of “a great social network meeting site” hitting the top of the public’s favor.

For a quick look at what’s happening with Facebook, Google and Twitter here’s a graph from Compete.com which clearly shows the rise of Facebook’s popularity. It will be interesting to see if there’s a spike in users when the Facebook movie comes out.

Which ever way it goes we just like to say congratulations to Facebook, it’s been a great ride for us users. To hit 500M users is a power house of an achievement in anybodies language, even if it really hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s an article by By Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld.com that covers the excitement Facebook heads must be feeling.

Social networking phenom expects to crest half a billion users this week

Computerworld – Facebook is hoping to hit a major milestone this week.

The social networking phenomenon is expecting to grab its 500 millionth user this week, according to Andrew Noyes, a Facebook spokesman. With just about a half-billion users, Facebook has become a social networking powerhouse that has helped to transform the way people use the Internet and connect with one another.

“Half a billion users is quite a milestone no matter how you look at it,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. “This obviously makes Facebook the numero uno social network, which is a quite an accomplishment. However, they can’t rest on their pixel laurels. Their position guarantees them additional scrutiny in terms of user security, appropriate content and stability.”

Rumors have been circulating online that Facebook has some big plans to celebrate its 500 millionth user, but Noyes declined to say what they might be.

The expected milestone could be coming on the heels of what was a poor month for Facebook.

Earlier this month, Inside Facebook, a site that tracks Facebook usage, reported that the social network’s growth dropped dramatically between May and June. Facebook picked up 320,800 new U.S. users in June, according to Inside Facebook, a far cry from the 7.8 million U.S. users it acquired in May. That followed news in March that Facebook replaced Google as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week.

The huge drop in new users led industry analysts to speculate that some people may be tiring of Facebook and social networking in general. Facebook’s recent spate of privacy issues also may have put off some people who otherwise might have joined the site.

However, other studies have shown that some Facebook users are obsessive about the site. Many even call themselves social networking addicts.

Last week, a report from The Oxygen Media Insights Group, part of a company that focuses on television channels and Web sites for women, reported that a majority of women say they’re addicted to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

But regardless of any obsession, Olds was quick to note that Facebook is still open to attack from rival companies that would like a piece of its social media pie.

“No doubt, being top dog also puts a big target on their backs,” Olds added. “Every new social network will be gunning for them, looking to peel off users. They’ll be looking to exploit every real or perceived Facebook shortcoming and turn it into the basis to drive their own new network.”

At the end of last month, rumors began to spread that Google is working on what could be a Facebook-killer. There’s still quite a bit of online chatter that Google is developing a social networking service, dubbed Google Me, that would compete directly with Facebook.

Just to add some shameless self promotion, ROI Consultancy is on Facebook too. Click and add us a friends and we’ll add you too. Shameless!

One of the most appealing factors about the Facebook Cost Per Click advertising is the depth of targeting you can achieve for all of your adverts. Facebook currently allows you to select and define your audience much more specifically, which for an advertiser can only be a good thing.

The more of the “unrelated” audience you can remove from seeing your advert and therefore clicking on it and wasting your money the better, and with the amount of selections you can make with Facebook you should really be able to achieve near perfect targeting of your audience. As every advertiser knows, if you can remove most of the audience that will not really be worth paying for before they have a chance to click on your advert, the more money you will end up saving both in wasted clicks and receiving much better traffic.

So, what options does Facebook have that make their system perfect for targeted, paid traffic?

Location - Because of the level of information you need to put into Facebook before you can have a profile, they have a much better understanding of the demographics of their users, meaning the targeting is much improved on other PPC programs. With the location selection on Facebook, you can not only target people from a specific country, but you can also select the city as well and then set a radius for people from surrounding areas. If you had a small shop in Cardiff that only sold to people calling into the shop and not online, this means that you could only have your advert show to people in Cardiff and the surrounding areas.

Age - Being able to select the age of your preferred audience is really useful if you are selling something age specific, maybe along the lines of life insurance or mortgage protection, as you would assume that only certain age categories would want this. It also helps to deliver different kind of adverts to people of different agents, which is proved to be necessary for getting the maximum reward from an advertisement campaign.

Gender - If your product is gender specific, things like some kind of insurances or clothing, to be able to select the desired sex of your audience is a necessity, as it will eliminate the chance of unrelated or wanted click throughs, again, saving you money and getting more from your budget.

Languages Spoken – Some products, services or offerings are sometimes related to a specific nationality, religion or language and Facebook gives you the power to only advertise to people that speak certain languages. This can work two ways, the main being removing people who can not understand the native tongue of your advert, hence saving wasting click throughs and the other is too really target specific nationalities and languages.

Likes And Interests – This is a really fantastic little filter if your advert is hobby or craft related, because you can actually select your advert to only be show to people who have selected something related as this interest. For example, if you were selling Manchester United football shirts, you could select to only display your adverts to people interested in sports or football, which would be an obviously targeted audience for your product or service.

Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.

He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business.

http://clearwebservices.com/ For More Information, please call 01594 835 857 or email info@clearwebservices.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ian_D_Spencer
http://EzineArticles.com/?Using-Facebook-Cost-Per-Click-Campaigns-to-Drive-Targeted-Traffic-to-Your-Site&id=4316517

At last and finally Melbourne City Council has agreed to supply free WiFi for the public domain, as long as your in the domain of where these two internet hotspots will be setup like the town square and shopping and dining districts.

The exact details are still being thrashed out, but at least having free WiFi in the CBD will be a reality .. eventually.

We refer to this article published at iTNews For Australian Business written by Mahesh Sharma

Darebin City Council dares to offer free access.

A Melbourne council plans to spend $45,000 on a free wireless hotspot trial to target the 40 percent of local residents who don’t have home internet access.

Darebin City Council will set up two internet hotspots in the town square and shopping and dining district over the next few years, according to local councillor Greco Gaetano, who pitched the plan after studying free wi-fi projects at several councils in American and European cities.

Gaetano’s global study tour was funded by a fellowship from the Municipal Assocation of Victoria.

Gaetano told iTnews that Darebin City Council will proceed with its trial cautiously to avoid mistakes made by overseas councils offering free wi-fi.

“What happened in the past was promises were made, sometimes very outlandish, that everyone wil be hooked up and wired up and have access to this signal,” Mr Gaetano said.

“We want to do it well and properly, so there’s no stuff-ups at the demonstration stage. If we can’t get that right and do that properly, how are we going to move the project further than that?

“This is something new for councils… We want to wrap this around the other stakeholders in the process, clearly articulating what the service is used for.”

He mentioned similar projects are being carried out by councils in Melbourne, Geelong and Perth.

He said the council’s aim was to provide basic internet services to people that can’t afford to engage with an ISP.

Studies have shown that 40 percent of the Darebin community doesn’t access the internet at home, particularly among a relatively high concentration of low-income residents, according to Mr Gaetano.

“It’s the age factor – older residents don’t use computers as much – and also economic reasons,” he said. “Some people can’t afford expensive contracts with service providers. We noticed that many of our residents use our library services, which are already a hotspot.

“In the 21st century, this is they type of infrastructure councils should be considering. We should be asking whether this should be thought of as a future council utility.”

He did not have any take-up targets but said that overseas projects showed it was rare for over fifty percent of residents to use free wi-fi services.

Of course the usual questions regurgitate through ones mind, what if there’s an election, just how accessible will the “Free” part be, will the parking fees increase to cover the costs and so on it goes. After all we are dealing with a “Council” and if you are a resident living and working in Melbourne you’ll understand what we mean. God forbid we should be scathing and generalize all councils solely look after there own interests, give with the right, take with the left .. but we won’t be scathing .. will we?

We’d like to congratulate local councilor Greco Gaetano on finding the inspiration and funding to actually pitch this idea to the other council “Bosses” .. and win!

So for now, we’ll be looking forward to opening our Laptops or iPads and connecting for free .. down the track .. in a “few” years.

Until then .. Hey Telstra what about YOU?

You have a business and you’re worried about your Brand not being seen or even heard about and you’re getting frustrated .. there’s no need to be .. it’s just a Myth that getting your Brand seen or heard of is Hard Yakka.

Read my post and see if it makes sense to you .. pretty easy right!

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to approach branding the same way big companies do. Niche marketing on the internet is a very different way of doing business than selling laundry detergent on the supermarket shelves.

Throwing money at a brand is no guarantee of successfully hitting your target market. Examples of this type of thinking and how it’s not the case are frequently shown and in particular the internet “Hotshots” like these examples listed below ..

Webvan.com
Tesco have shown that online grocery deliveries can work but Webvan never displayed the business nous to be a success. Raising $375 million, Webvan expanded to 8 US cities, and built a huge infrastructure. However, with extremely thin margins being neglected, unreliable delivery times, and insufficient customers this dot com was always doomed to failure.

Kozmo.com
The idea was that you could order anything from snacks to movies at any time and have them delivered direct to your door within one hour with no delivery charge. The idea was great but ultimately a little too good to be true. Eventually a $10 minimum charge was introduced but the company still went out of business after working through $280 million in investment.

eToys.com
After raising $166 million in May 1999 eToy’s share price fell from a high of $84 to only 9 cents per share in February 2001. In such a competitive industry and unable to benefit from pester power (kids encourage parents to make a high percentage of purchases in the toy industry) this company was destined never to live up to its billing.

In short you can see that throwing money at your brand is not necessarily the way to go, although if you do have a failure, you might still be able to profit from it by selling an eBook of all the mistakes you made while trying to boost your brand, just like Boo.com did.

Anyway. Let’s get to the 3 Major Branding Myths .. ahhh that’s better.

Myth #1

“I need to make my business / company / product a household name”

Truth: The most successful and profitable businesses do one thing and do it very very well. They target, closely target their market. In other words focus on getting your business name and your advertising in front of your best potential customers. These are the people who have expressed an interest in your product or service and what it offers. Don’t try and get your products in front of everyone .. not everyone wants your product, that is of course unless your product is Jelly Beans and in that case, your market has already been covered .. anyway I digress.

Why would you waste your hard earned cash advertising to a broad audience when you can channel that money into your targeted market group who actually want your product or service. Makes sense?

Myth #2

“Branding my business online means thousands of dollars worth of high-visibility banner advertising”

Truth: Banner advertising is dead, well maybe not dead, but perhaps very very ill. Banner advertising used to be the hot ticket item that sold millions and believe me companies paid millions to have their banners popping, flashing and generally goggling your eyes out. Not any more tho. Although having said that I must say that targeting a banner or two to your target market does work albeit very slightly.

Try and focus your advertising dollars on more targeted performance based platforms, as in Google AdWords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing programs as these actually do work cause they place your ad in front of only those people searching for your products or services. Makes sense again don’t it?

The bottom lines is .. Pay for Customers, Not Potentials

Myth #3

“I’ll need to spend lot’s of money if I want to gain brand recognition”

Truth: There’s plenty of free and low-cost techniques that you can use to brand your e-business, especially if you’re a small to medium business or even a home based business. The one that springs to mind with the least amount of effort is Social Marketing.

Social marketing is today’s biggest advertising platform with sites like Facebook, Twitter and all the others thrown in competing for your dollar spend and most importantly, giving you the reins by allowing you to target your advertising directly to those wanting your business.

Social marketing is also easy to do cause you’re the one doing it and let’s face it, you’re the one that knows most about his/her business .. aren’t you? If not, you’d best get cracking and find out about your own business so as to tell others and get them buying your great products and/or services.

So the upshot is .. getting your brand in front of people wanting to see it has not ever been easier to do. The internet is like a huge database of customers wanting whatever all the time and if you find your niche market you can get in front of these of people for hardly any or no cost at all.

Hope this little post inspires you and helps to get your business happening as that’s the business we’re in at ROI Consultancy.

Bonn Appetite

To answer the above question, one needs to understand a few basic ideas.

There are only two ways of getting Web traffic – either you let your visitors find you which is rather a passive method, or you actively search for places where your targeted visitors may hang around and personally engage them into communication. While the first type is illustrative of SEO and the traditional paid advertising approach, the second is more the Web 2.0 style, and may include blogging, blog commenting, participation in forum discussions, posting and voting for articles, social bookmarking, and so on.

Imagine what effect your efforts in social media marketing could bring. For example, communicating your company news to your existing and prospect customers for your brand exposure and following their feedback is one task, while receiving quality backlinks and traffic to your site are the second and the third tasks.

Next, if you look for inexpensive traffic from social media as your primary goal [its quality can hardly be compared to search engines' paid and organic search traffic], you should understand that your message should have a great viral potential and your landing page should justify visitors’ attention. Otherwise, in spite of a possible visitor deluge, you will be back to square one.

There are different and often quite opposite opinions on the value of traffic from social media. There are Web experts who consider it to be garbage, but far more people tell about the importance of social media for creating brand awareness, getting customer feedback and attracting traffic. So the logical conclusion is not all products and services can be efficiently promoted on social media sites.

Let’s see what effects you can expect from the leading social media entities.

According to Compete‘s most recent data (February 2010, also mentioned further), Facebook is the largest social media site with over 127 million unique monthly visitors. Both corporations and one-man-bands can use Facebook for creating their company and product brand awareness quite effectively, but you cannot expect much traffic and link popularity increase in connection with your Facebook activity.

YouTube comes second having more than 90 million unique visitors. YouTube is a good playground for your branding efforts, whether you are a small business company or corporation. A well-crafted creative video will become a valuable brick in your link popularity building. But since video files are hosted by YouTube itself, you can attract solid targeted traffic to your site only if your video includes a smart call to action requiring a visit to your site.

Twitter enjoys 20+ million unique visitors. Being a blog in nature, it is best for communicating company news if you are a large corporation, and for establishing your brand reputation if you are a small business, especially if you do consulting work. Don’t expect much traffic from Twitter as a reply to your marketing attempts, and shortened URLs in tweets are useless as SEO links.

Digg‘s potential with more than 37 million unique visitors is a great place to release provocative information, but not for general marketing efforts. This is why so many marketing gurus have abandoned this battlefield. But if you can provide information in the format appreciated by Digg enthusiasts, you can receive rich traffic from this resource and a valuable link.

27 million unique users of Flickr have made it a great social medium but only if you have some photo and image materials to promote your brand among Flickr visitors. So if you are a web design company or your business can be represented by artwork, you may find Flickr a decent place to have a presence in.

The LinkedIn business network (14+ million unique users) is good for both individual experts and larger companies to establish and support their brands. Personal and company profiles appear high in search results for a name request and your company news can be released for members of the various “groups”.

The audience of StumbleUpon (4+ million unique users to their website) is not limited to just those who have visited their website. Most ‘stumblers” activity is performed when a visitor to an interesting webpage clicks “I Like It” via the StumbleUpon toolbar in their browser. StumbleUpon is a very good traffic referrer if you publish and bookmark helpful, interesting content. Be sure to submit your own material by clicking on your own toolbar.

When considering if your business will benefit from your promotional activities in social media, you should focus on how the nature of a channel itself (news/article/video/image sharing, personal or business social network) fits your business, and what effects (brand recognition, good SEO links, targeted or just rich traffic) you can expect from your efforts.

~ Bonn Appetite and share it around

Online Brand Popularity ..
How to measure it!

The deeper information technologies penetrate our lives, the more powerfully you and your customers can use them for decision making. All we need to make the best available choice is reliable information – from eyewitnesses, first-hand users, reviewers, and experts.

Search engines and news feeds give you a good idea if your brand is established and how it is perceived on the Web. But sites providing user-generated content – shared opinions in the form of ratings and votes, reviews and comments, tags and bookmarks – are even more important places for you to check brand reputation, and measure brand popularity.

What are the measurable signals of brand popularity?

Search for mentions of your brand name, create benchmarks, and run comparisons with your top competitors. Brand popularity metrics can be monitored at:

• Major search engines for both search volume (Google) and the number of found results.
• Blog search engines (Technorati, Google Blogs) for the overall number of blog posts, tags, comments, blog authority rates. There is no need to track all the blog search engines – select one or two with the results that you find most representative.
• Sites consisting of user submitted content (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.) for votes and comments.
• Twitter for found search results, followers, retweets.
• Media sharing sites (YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Flickr, Deviantart, and many others) for the number of uploads and downloads, views or listenings, video/image/photo/music ratings, number of comments.
• Social bookmark sites and toolbars (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and others) for tags and saved bookmarks.
• Product and service review sites if applicable (Epinions, Ratings, Buzzillions etc.) for the number of reviews, pro and con votes, ratings.
• Forums for the number of search results, threads, user reputation, connections.
• Social networks for engagement facts such as the number of connections, profile completeness, recommendations, participations in groups, Q&A, etc.

At the same time, brand reputation measurement should rest not only upon the numbers being quantitative characteristics of popularity, but also upon qualitative evidence. An analysis should also include the prevailing tone of the reviews, articles or comments.

How to automate the brand popularity analysis

The market has replied to a social media boom with numerous buzz and sentiment analysis tools. The most comprehensive solutions are quite costly. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sysomos’s MAP and Heartbeat and Radian6 are outstanding web buzz tracking and analysis solutions covering tens of millions of blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms, but a typical ‘do-it-yourself’ small business marketer could hardly afford them.

So if the perspective of paying a three- or even four-digit monthly fee is beyond your purse, a healthy approach would be to focus your analysis on a) the most popular (and crowded) social media and b) the most targeted (niche) sites while using free tools to check your brand reputation on them. The below free services will automate your brand reputation monitoring task rather efficiently.

• Major search engines – use the Web CEO Keywords tool to retrieve the search volume from Google and competition numbers from all the major search engines.
• Blog search engines – Nielsen BlogPulse is a great free service to see brand popularity trends. You can also use BlogScope for the same purpose.
• For Twitter info analysis, you can use TweetStats, Twitter Analyzer (< By far the best Twitter App seen in a long while), TweetVolume and Twopular.

Measuring positive and negative sentiments is still difficult to achieve via automated measuring services. Scoutlabs service (which is quite expensive) brings the best results in sentiment analysis and trend building. To our best knowledge, the current technologies for automated text meaning recognition are far from perfect. This is why, to guarantee the most accurate results, some expensive reputation management solutions offer manual sentiment measurement.

~ Bonn Appetite

Share this one please

Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

U.S. Growth in Average time Person on Facebook and Twitter Outpaces Growth of Overall Category
People in the U.S. continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.

Year-over-year growth in average time spent by U.S. users, for both Facebook and Twitter.com, outpaced the overall growth for the category, increasing 200% and 368%, respectively. Among, the top five U.S. social networking sites, Twitter.com continued its reign as the fastest-growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors, increasing 579% year-over-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.

However, month-over-month, unique visitors decreased 5%

Australia Leads in Average Time Spent per Person on Social Media Sites in December
When narrowed by individual country, with 142.1 million unique visitors the United States had the largest number of social media and blog users in December, followed by Japan, which had 46.6 million unique visitors during the month.

Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December. The United States and the United Kingdom came in a close second and third, with 6 hours and 9 minutes and 6 hours and 8 minutes, respectively.

*Global data takes into account the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy

~ Bonn Appetite

My brilliant sister in-law sent an email with this little game in it and …

OMG MY SANDY ONLY LASTED 30 SECONDS!!

Steer Sandy Seal through the dangers of unprotected waters and sign the petition to Save Our Marine Life.

From

Game on! Help protect Australia’s coast

Brian Solis is a principal at new media agency FutureWorks. You can connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

In 2009, influence emerged as a source of filtering and focus, especially when Twitter () released its new “lists” feature to empower users to organize and follow custom streams by topic, personality, and themes.

Klout, which analyzes content from millions of people to identify the top influencers on every topic, is one service that measures influence on Twitter. Klout today released its Top 2009 list of the topics that captured the attention of the most influential voices and their communities on Twitter.

Twitter recently published a Top 2009 Trends list, which essentially symbolized a digital microcosm of culture and conversations throughout the year. Klout’s list differs in the methodology used to organize it.

Per Klout’s announcement:

In 2009 we saw an explosion of users and content on Twitter. The “real-time stream” fed us information before the mainstream media could even react, user communities flexed their collective muscle and demonstrated the power of “word of mouth,” leaving companies to either ride the social wave or be subject to the wrath of millions of voices. There’s no denying it: in 2009, social media continued to profoundly change the way we communicate, the way we find and share information, and the relationship between brands and consumers.

1. Topics Influencers Talked About

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14. Cities Influencers Talked About

~ Twitter is by far the most recognizable success story of 2009 with an estimated net worth ofbetween $150 Mil to $1b, depending on who you talk to.

One thing is for sure, Twitter is not going away just yet and it is still being very closely watched by Google as a possible acquisition.

Main point being, Tweet while the twitt’ins good, before it bought and re-directed, re-designed and re-hashed

Bonn Appetite

By: Andrea Koskey
Examiner Staff Writer
December 31, 2009

Companies and government agencies are using social networking sites such as Facebook to make announcements and keep in touch with the community. (Courtesy photo)

Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don’t want employees logging on during work hours.

According to a nationwide survey conducted by Robert Half Technology, a Menlo Park-based company, 54 percent of 1,400 companies surveyed completely restrict employees from visiting social networking sites. Another 19 percent restrict use for business purposes only.

Dave Knapp, regional vice president for Robert Half, said employers find social networking a waste of time.

“It takes away from primary responsibility,” Knapp said. “When socializing on sites such as Facebook, we lose track of time.”

Facebook is a social networking site that offers people the opportunity to share photos and messages with friends. There are 250 million users on the site.

Twitter, which has about 5 million users, allows users to send messages to “followers” through 140-character updates.

Another concern companies may have with social networking sites is the possibility of employees leaking confidential information or sharing thoughts that may reflect badly on the company, Knapp said.

“Many of these companies are still trying to set boundaries,” Knapp said.

For business purposes, however, sites such as Facebook have become increasingly popular for companies to introduce new products or connect with costumers, Knapp said.

Peninsula corporations such as Genetech and Electronic Arts have Facebook pages.

Jamie Grenney, director of social media for San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, said using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube allows the company to reach thousands of customers at once.

Salesforce.com has about 100 employees that are trained to update each of the social media sites; all employees at the company are also given social media training because they are allowed access to the social networking sites, Grenney said.

“It’s very easy to spin up a Twitter account and publish something,” he said. “There’s no undo button. The damage can already be done. We know what could get [employees] and the company in trouble and we want to steer clear of this.”

The public sector has also jumped on the social media bandwagon: South San Francisco, San Mateo Union High School District and BART are among government agencies with their own Facebook and Twitter accounts.

San Mateo County has considered launching a Facebook page, but currently restricts employee use of social networking sites.

“There’s an expectation that when punched in on county time, [employees are] not spending residents’ money for personal use,” said Chris Flatmoe, the county’s technology director.
Limited access

A nationwide survey of 1,400 Chief Information Officers revealed that a majority of companies prohibit social networking on the job:

54 percent prohibit social networking completely
19 percent limit use to business purposes only
16 percent allow for limited personal use
10 percent permit any type of personal use
1 percent did not respond

Source: Robert Half Technology

~ Bonn Appetite