Listen to the webinar, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Networking.

Q: On what grounds can you be fired for posting personal information to be share with "friends"?

Wilkins: Anything that could get you fired from misuse of email, telephone, etc. - posting inappropriate pictures or remarks; anything racist, sexist (or other –ist); etc. – could get you fired for cause. Similarly, if you share sensitive or confidential information you could get terminated for cause or for breach of, say, a nondisclosure or confidentiality agreement.

Q: Our company is worried that if something is posted on an unmoderated site then we could be liable, a HIPPA violation for example. One employee posts a blog comment about another person's health status, and the Company is liable for what the employee posts. How do I address that in a Policy?

Wilkins: "Employees are prohibited from posting anything of a personal nature about another person, including but certainly not limited to: work status, familial status, health/medical status, or financial information. Employees who post information of a personal nature about another person will be subject to disciplinary action."

Q: AIIM uses the term "Enterprise 2.0." What is the difference between Web 2.0 (or Government 2.0 or Health 2.0) and Enterprise 2.0?

Wilkins: Web 2.0 is the tools, processes, and mindset described at the start of the webinar. Enterprise 2.0 is their application inside the organization, generally with an inward focus.

Q: Any ideas on how to decide whether to birth content in collaboration tools (wikis, blogging, forums, etc.) versus a traditional tool such as a word processing document?

Wilkins: If it is a collaborative process, use a collaborative tool. Where the rubber meets the road is this: If you send it to someone else for review and expect them to do any meaningful markup or editing, use a collaborative tool. And if you are collaborating in the production of something with other authors, use a collaborative tool.

Q: I am new to LinkedIn and have tried to connect with numerous people. It surprises me that at least a few people do not use LinkedIn at all, or extremely rarely, and that these people think it is a "social network" like Twitter or Facebook, although LinkedIn is primarily for and about business relationships. Any input? Maybe LinkedIn needs to update its image?

Wilkins: LinkedIn is arguably the least "social" of the tools considered to fall under social networking. There are a number of criticisms of LinkedIn in the wild, with some wanting it to become FB for business and others wanting it to remove its more social tools like groups.

Q: How do you incent people to fill in their skills, prior project participation, etc. on personal info sites (within the enterprise)?

Wilkins: A very simple way is to put some kind of rating (e.g., John Smith has completed 80% of his profile) or icon (green star for 60%, gold star for 100%). The next step would be to add something along the lines of "John smith has completed 80% of his profile. Click here to ask him to update his profile photo (or personal interests, or division, etc.). Not all tools support these capabilities, but many of them do.

Q: What's the legal position on who owns the LindedIn connections when an employee uses an official corporate email address? What happens when an employee leaves and the company is in need of those connections?

Wilkins: I just don't know and we won't know until it's litigated. If I had to be pinned down I'd say both - as the contact is more personal to the individual, but the contact may have been made because of the organizational tie. Same way it would work with a rolodex or list of phone numbers.

Q: What do you recommend for capturing official records (and their disposition) of Web 2.0 media for those of us who don't have an EIM or content management tool?

Wilkins: First, determine whether something *is* a record or not. Just because it's available doesn't necessarily mean it is required to be saved. (BUT it may still be discoverable or need to be provided under FOIA-type laws. Just saying.) The easiest way to save most of these tools today that update steadily (blogs, Twitter, etc.) is to capture the RSS feed, which is an XML format, which can be saved in everything from a database to an Excel spreadsheet to a text file. For wikis, most wikis can save a baseline or snapshot which can then become the record. It can be saved as a wiki (which is a database + formatting) or exported out to XML, PDF, etc. depending on the tool.

Q: How do you handle breaking news at a conference when you want your media relations team to break it versus an attendee via twitter?

Wilkins: There is no good answer for this one - the conventional wisdom today in the social media space is that trying to control the message the way we could in PR 1.0 is like trying to push a rope. If you don't want someone not on the media relations team to break it, don't make it available to anyone else. Once the announcement has happened, it's gonna be Tweeted, blogged, analyzed, commented on, etc. and the horse is out of the barn.

Q: Doesn’t the use of policies to manage mean that you are reactive and use the policy to punish once a violation has occurred?

Wilkins: I disagree. Training users on policies allows expectations to be set proactively as to what is appropriate. The enforcement piece is reactive, to be sure, but there is a growing body of anecdotal evidence that indicates that most users will do the right thing if they know what that is. Having a policy AND training users on it AND enforcing it has one additional benefit: if something bad does happen, such as the HIPAA concern expressed by another participant, the organization can point to the policy, training, and auditing to indicate that it is an isolated occurrence rather than a common practice.

Q: Re: potential HIPAA violation. What if the sensitive information is legitimate as a collaboration tool -- not a violation? For example, how are these "documents" handled as "records," perhaps, for e-discovery?

Wilkins: All of these tools are discoverable, just like anything else, subject to the nuances of your jurisdiction and the nature of the litigation. As such, discovery would still have to meet whatever requirements for handling of e.g. HIPAA PHI that would be the case with regards to email or Word documents.

Q: How can we measure ROI on collaboration technologies?

Wilkins: Some organizations have taken a stab at it but the metrics are complicated to gather because they often rely on formula like, "Well, drafting X document normally took 40 man-hours over a 6-week period, and now we can do it in 30 man-hours over a 2-week period, so take the burdened salary at X and it's 33% lower so...." which doesn't address when it takes 60 hours because more people are involved, but they are the right people so there's less rework later, or it's a better product, etc. In other cases, particularly for sales, marketing, and other external-facing tools, it becomes a question of ROA, or risk of absence. Will you start losing customers because they think you are behind the curve?

Q: Can you comment on "Prediction Markets" and "Tagging" as enterprise 2.0 tools?

Wilkins: Not familiar enough with prediction markets to address them. Tagging is not so much a tool, enterprise or otherwise, as it is a feature of many of these tools.

Q: What is tagging?

Wilkins: Tagging is the application of free-form metadata to an information object. This capability is common to blogs and social sharing and less common to the other tools. Tagging often results in the creation of a "tag cloud" which lists all of the tags used in that particular site or blog. There are different ways of differentiating density of tag usage - some sites use different font sizes or weights, while others list them in decreasing order of frequency. In many instances clicking on a particular tag will return a list of all information objects that have been tagged with that particular tag.

And for all the karaoke questions: My favorite Eminem song is "Lose Yourself" and my favorite Dokken song is "In My Dreams." I will be performing somewhere in Orlando the week of October 10 and in Philadelphia the week of April 20-22, 2010. :)

Jesse Wilkins  is a principal consultant with Access Sciences. A well-known records management and social media expert, Jesse and his colleagues helped create the content for AIIM's Email Management training program, as well as AIIM’s new Electronic Records Management program. Follow him on Twitter.