Conversations and Connections - social media at SAS

Last night I was on a panel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (as I was required to write it when I was a reporter) called "Careers in Social Media," sponsored by University Career Services and organized by Gary Alan Miller. My fellow panelists were Ruby Sinreich, Greg Hyer, Ginny Skalski and Gregory Ng. We had a nice turnout of interested students who asked a lot of great questions.

I wish I had taken notes because my fellow panelists offered a lot of great advice. Here are some of the key points, in the order I remember them.

You've got maybe a year left in which "knowledge of social media" will make your resume stand out, depending on your field. You need something else to hang your hat on. In the biz world we call that "domain expertise." Much better to be able to say, "I've interned at The XYZ Coalition and honed my knowledge of sustainable urban biodiversity education for pre-kindergarteners and here are the ways I've used social media to develop and share my expertise," rather than, "I'm on Facebook."

Find something you're passionate about and build your social media activity around that. Before you know it, it could turn into a way to make a living.

Intern or volunteer to get some real world experience. Find a topic that excites you or an organization you believe in and volunteer to create a Facebook fan page for them, for instance.

Find a niche and fill it. There are a lot of people out there making money doing something relatively specialized and esoteric online because they were the first to do it or they're doing it better than anyone else.

Here's a way that worked for me: In 2001 I went to the Iceland Airwaves music festival and had one of the best weeks of my life. I came home and created a Geocities site about the trip, the country, the food and the music (no, Geocities doesn't exist anymore). Icelandair, the organizers of the festival, saw it and liked it and linked to it, and brought me back the next two years to write the daily festival blog.

Start a blog and write about the field you want to work in. Demonstrate your knowledge, your passion and your ability to communicate about and participate in that community. Write as though you were already a knowledgeable member of that community (without misrepresenting yourself, of course) and before you know it, you will be.

Create content. Figure out how to put out something of real value and interest. The people who are standing out in social media are putting it out there all the time, while other people are on the couch watching TV.

Go to networking events and actually talk to people. Let people know you're looking for a job and what you want to do. Don't go to hand out resumes, but to make genuine connections.

Get your LinkedIn profile up to date and looking as professional as possible. Link to your teachers and ask them for recommendations.

Build your networks on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Work at it. Start when you're still in school, not the day you start your job search.

This should go without saying, but make sure when a prospective employer searches your name (and they will) they aren't finding pictures of you doing keg stands. And have a professional-sounding email address, as I've said before. Firstname.lastname@gmail.com will always work.

Decide what your online brand is going to be. Pick a distinctive and professional iteration of your name that you can own online. (If you have a common name like Dave Thomas, you'll need to work harder to find a differentiated version.)

Once you've decided on your brand, own it everywhere you can. If your brand is Camilla Q. McGillicuddy, go buy camillaqmcgillicuddy.com (it's available, I checked), register camillaqmcgillicuddy@gmail.com, grab that username on Twitter, set it up as your Facebook vanity URL, etc. When a new service comes along, jump in there and register your username right away.

Trust me, you will never regret having a consistent online brand. (Google "David B. Thomas" and you'll see what I mean. I will likely never be the top result because I missed the chance to buy davidbthomas.com a long time ago, thinking that dbthomas.com was better.)

What else?

Recently Mitch Joel and Joseph Jaffe promised to auction off keynote addresses for Haiti relief, with their services going to the highest bidder. This idea inspired me to do something similar here in the Triangle. As with all human endeavors involving more than one person, it took some time to organize, but we've got the participants lined up, so let's get this started.

We will plan and present a half-day social media workshop to the Triangle-area company that makes the highest donation to Red Cross Haiti relief, with a reserve of $1000. The workshop will be held onsite at your company and tailored to your needs. I've lined up a solid group of social media professionals to make this a truly valuable event:

Wayne Sutton, nationally known blogger at http://socialwayne.com and social media/community strategist for Twine Interactive,

Jeff Cohen, a social media consultant and practitioner and one of the principles of SocialMediaB2B.com, one of the most active and useful sites for social media for business,

Mur Lafferty, award-winning podcasting author, writer, blogger, and speaker, co-author of Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, host of I Should Be Writing, the Tor.com Story podcast, and several fiction podcasts,

Brian McDonald, marketing director at Zencos, blogger at http://squarejawmedia.com and Social Media VP of the Triangle chapter of the American Marketing Association,

Ryan Boyles, community manager at IBM, focused on connecting with customers and partners with social media and nurturing brand advocates with engagement inside and outside the company firewall,

David B. Thomas (me), social media manager at SAS, responsible for directing SAS’ social media strategy and the practical aspects of integrating social media into the company's operations globally.

Ready to start the bidding? We'll do it by email. Send your bids, starting at $1000, to trianglebenefit@gmail.com. We'll keep the bidding open until 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 19. The workshop will go to the company that promises by email before the deadline to make the highest donation over $1000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund. Once you’ve been notified that you’ve won the bid, you'll be asked to provide proof of your donation before we plan the event.

A few common-sense rules: This auction is open to companies and organizations in the Triangle area of North Carolina (Raleigh, Cary, Durham, Chapel Hill and environs). We will present the workshop at the donor company’s Triangle location or a Triangle site of your choosing. The winning donor company is responsible for providing the location and facilities. Any expenses related to the facility and the event, and any required materials, as well as any refreshments you want to provide, are the responsibility of the winning donor. In other words, we're not bringing the coffee or pads and pencils or any of that stuff, and it would be great if you could supply a projector. Any tax implications of this donation are solely the responsibility of the donor company.

We'll work with you to find a mutually-agreeable time for the workshop before June 1, 2010.

If you know a company that would be interested, please help us by forwarding this, and sharing it with your networks.

Please note: I’m involved in this and promoting it on my blog, but this is not an official SAS-sponsored event. All of the folks involved in this event are participating on their own and not as official representatives of their respective companies.

When Chris visited SAS last month, there was a heated debate going on in social media circles about the idea of "social media certification," and the idea of paying money to become "certified." Here's Chris' take on the subject.

Last night I went to Social Media Club Triangle, ably organized by my friends Wayne Sutton and Jeff Cohen. The event took place at DSI Comedy Theater in beautiful downtown Carrboro, NC (the Paris of the Piedmont). Zach Ward from DSI took us through some improv exercises, then told us how the same principles can apply to social media. It was fascinating. I was a little apprehensive at first, fearing it was going to be a big stretch, but by the end of the talk I was completely sold.

In addition to running DSI, Zach does corporate facilitation, leads workshops and is a speaker. If you're looking for somebody to come into your company and shake things up a bit and get people in a new frame of mind about communication, Zach's your man.

In this annoyingly shaky video clip (no, I don't carry a tripod with me at all times), Zach talks about the principles of repetition and contrast, and how they're equally important in comedy and social media.

Chris and I talked about how some people are moving away from blogs toward tools like Posterous. What's the long term impact? Are blogs still important?

As you may have seen on the homepage of sas.com, or in the tweets and status updates of many of my colleagues, SAS has been ranked number 1 on the Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. We’ve been on the list every year since it began, but this is the first time we’ve been at the top. As you can imagine, people around here are pretty excited.

Before I took on the social media manager job at SAS, I was on the PR team, and administered the Fortune application process for two years. Two thirds of the ranking is based on an anonymous employee survey, so if your employees aren’t happy, you’re not going to make the list, no matter how pretty your application.

In January of 2009, our CEO Jim Goodnight said we would take a hit to profits rather than lay people off. Obviously, with bad economic news all around, that must have had a huge impact on employees’ state of mind. I attribute our top position in large part to Jim’s tangible and undeniable demonstration that he truly does put employees first.

Of course, as we also saw today in our financials release, we didn’t take a hit; our revenue and our profitability both increased – another testament to the value of keeping your employees happy so they can stay focused.

That being said, how much did social media play a role? I think it certainly helped. In 2009 we released our Social Media Guidelines and Recommendations. With a majority of companies still blocking employees from participating in social media, we told ours, “We trust you. Go ahead.” That was another clear and tangible demonstration of our commitment to employees.

Social media tools have also helped to make our company, which spreads out to include 11,000 employees at offices all over the world, feel like a smaller, friendlier place to work. I regularly communicate through a variety of social media channels with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Australia, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovakia and more. Even Canada! And it’s made me feel more connected with colleagues in Cary - some even in my own building - who I might be geographically close to but don’t see very often.

SAS employees blog, are active on Twitter and Facebook, participate in LinkedIn groups, promote our events through social networks and YouTube - and all that is growing steadily and rapidly. I've been really pleased and excited by how receptive my colleagues have been to these new forms of communication.

Many of us have had the experience of meeting a colleague from another office, sharing some informal time together, and having that turn into a more effective working relationship. Social media will never replace face-to-face relationships, but it does help to extend and sustain those relationships. And those relationships in large part are what make a company a great place to work.

Or maybe even the best place to work.

I'll be part of a panel discussion this Thursday, presented by Shift Worldwide. The title is "From Fad to Function: Operationalizing Social Media within Corporations." My fellow panelists and I will be talking about how to take social media beyond the 101-level stuff you probably heard a lot of in 2009, and putting it into practice.

I'll be focusing on the nuts and bolts of getting your company ready to participate in social media. Based on the questions I heard a lot at conferences last year, I hope it will strike the right balance.

For more information about the event and my esteemed co-presenters, check out the Shift Worldwide event page.

Chris visited SAS in late December. We got him into our video studio to have a conversation with Deb Orton from our Customer Intelligence team about the ways companies are using social media. Those conversations will be available soon on the SAS YouTube channel. Watch this space for more details.

I also took Chris aside and stuck a camera in his face to ask for his insights into the world of social media. I ended up with half of dozen of those and I'll be posting them over the next few weeks. Great reason to subscribe, don't you think?

Last night I read Mitch Joel's post entitled "Keynote for a Cause," amplifying an idea originated by Joseph Jaffe. They're both auctioning off a keynote presentation with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Red Cross Haiti Relief. I was excited when I saw this because it's a really smart and innovative way for them to use their notoreity and knowledge to provide tangible help.

That got me thinking about what I could do. While I don't command tens of thousands of dollars for a keynote like those guys, I have presented at a number of social media conferences where people have paid tens or even hundreds of dollars.

I've already promised in a comment on Mitch's blog to organize a B2B-focused social media workshop for a company in the Triangle area of North Carolina that contributes. I still need to work out the details but the tentative plan is for a half-day onsite workshop to go to the highest bidder, with a reserve of $1000.

I contacted a few local social media luminaries last night around midnight and I've already gotten support and buy-in from Wayne Sutton, Jeff Cohen, Brian McDonald and Mur Lafferty. So I'm pretty confident we'll be able to put together a practical and valuable workshop. Once we've worked out the details I'll post again and get the bidding started.

So, what can you do?

What area of your expertise would someone be willing to pay for? Maybe you're not a keynote speaker, but if you're reading this blog it's safe to assume you're more knowledgeable and interested in social media than most of your friends or colleagues.

How about the next time one of your friends emails you to ask about Facebook privacy settings, write back and tell them you'll answer if they make a $10 donation to Haiti relief. The next time a colleague stops by your desk to ask why they should care about Twitter, hit 'em up for a donation. Put up a sign in the break room offering to do a LinkedIn lunch and learn session, admission: one donation.

If you have other ideas, please leave them in the comments. If you do something, let me know, too. Your ideas and actions will inspire others.

You don't have to be an expert; you just need to share what you know. It's a quick and easy way not only to raise awareness but to turn your knowledge into help for people who truly need it.

In 2009 I spoke at a number of events, some large and national and some small and local, about using social media for B2B. I noticed that the questions changed significantly throughout the course of the year. In January people were asking why they should care about social media and if it was just a fad. A few months later people were asking about who should own social media in an organization, simple ways to get started and how to manage their time so as not to get overwhelmed. Toward the end of the year, people were asking about how to integrate social media into existing marketing programs, how to measure ROI and how to use it to generate sales leads.

Kipp Bodnar has a great post on Social Media B2B that lays out a seven-step plan for using social media to generate B2B sales leads. Not only is this is a great example of the kind of focused, practical information that Kipp and Jeff Cohen regularly share on that site, but it also demonstrates another key point about the evolution of social media:

You already know how to do a lot of this stuff.

I'm going to share Kipp's post widely with marketers here at SAS, and I hope one thing they'll notice is that it's all common sense: You need to be able to analyze the effect of your online activities, have content worth sharing, build a lead generation infrastructure and back end to manage the data, have a plan for converting the leads once you get them, follow up and nurture your leads, and then analyze what did and didn't work.

Marketers at SAS already do all of that. We have a lead generation, tracking and nurturing strategy and infrastructure. The next step is figuring out how to add social media into that infrastructure. And if you think of social media as a set of tools rather than a strategy in itself, then you're halfway there. In some cases it might just be as simple as creating a new landing page, tracking code, unique URL or other tool that integrates with your existing methodology so that you can see what leads came from your social media efforts.

I've been telling people here that our biggest challenge in 2010 will be to make social media a part of people's job descriptions, as opposed to an add-on. That still sounds like too much to some people. But if you step back and look at how much of it can align with what you're already doing and integrate with your existing lead generation practices, it should start to sound less daunting and more doable.

It's been one year since I took on the job of social media manager at SAS. I've spent a lot of that time working on nuts and bolts, addressing concerns and objections and sitting in meetings (some productive and some less so). My biggest satisfaction in this role has been putting tools, policies and procedures in place that have helped my colleagues use social media to do their jobs better. My biggest frustration has been that the realities of working in a large enterprise often mean we can't always do things quickly.

One night last October I was lying in bed thinking about all that we still needed to do. I realized how easy it is to get bogged down in the details and lose sight of the mission. I worried that I wasn't inspiring anyone, just creating more corporate policies that people might never read. I got up, walked downstairs and wrote this vision straight through in about 20 minutes. Getting it written was extremely cathartic. I haven't shared it publicly up to now, although I can't really think why not.

This is neither a blueprint nor an action plan. This is my personal vision of where we need to be going. Some of these ideas are already underway, some will require significant shifts in mindset and/or resources. If I had a magic wand, this is where we would be today. I welcome your thoughts.

My vision for social media at SAS

SAS connects with its customers and prospects in the ways they want to connect. We use social media tools to show people our knowledge and expertise, rather than tell them about it. Our social media presence reflects our depth of experience and intelligence, our history and culture, and the reciprocal affection and respect we share with our users. Our online presence leaves no doubt that SAS is not only the smartest, most capable competitor in the analytics world, but also the one dedicated to making a genuine personal connection with our customers.

Social media becomes part of everyone's job description at SAS. Everyone in the company is given the tools, both physical and metaphorical, to communicate in social media. We trust our employees to use common sense. We trust our customers to respond positively to sincere efforts even if they sometimes have flaws. We recognize that communications tools, techniques and philosophies are changing dramatically and constantly and we go with the flow. We don't let fear and worst-case scenarios prevent us from making genuine people-to-people connections.

Community

SAS supports a robust community of users, giving them the tools to communicate in the ways they want to communicate. SAS customers of all kinds and at all levels can find information and connections relevant to their field and job easily through a central aggregation portal maintained by SAS. SAS employees participate in and contribute to the community and add real value for our customers, as well as building relationships and trust. We have a harmonious relationship with existing SAS communities and provide our expertise and resources to make the overall SAS online community experience as valuable and fun as it can be.

Blogs

SAS has an inclusive blogging program at blogs.sas.com. The blogs homepage shows Featured Blogs and top blogs by topic. Another page lists All SAS Blogs. After completing a brief online tutorial in blogging best practices and guidelines, any employee can create an external blog and have it listed in the All SAS Blogs page, which is searchable by topic, by blogger and by popularity.

Social Networks

SAS employees are active on the major social networks and use them to develop and maintain relationships with professional contacts. SAS has presences in all the major social networks globally, including a SAS Institute fan page on Facebook and an official SAS LinkedIn group. There are SAS fan pages and groups for all country offices, fan pages for each major product line (e.g. a SAS Customer Intelligence Fan Page), and groups for each industry vertical (SAS Financial Services, SAS Retail, etc.). Every major event and series of events has an event page. Responsibility for maintaining, updating and sharing on these groups is included in the job responsibilities of individual marketers and communicators. These social network presences serve as "outposts," designed to engage people who are already on those sites, then give them a reason to visit our "home base," sas.com.

Twitter

Our primary Twitter strategy is to encourage individual SAS employees to develop their own audiences and communicate with them in the most appropriate manner for that audience. There is a SAS Institute Twitter account, maintained by a group of people, that shares high-level news and information, interesting facts and links about our top-level business themes, tweets interesting and fun SAS facts, shares customer success stories and responds to general comments and inquiries. Requests for information and assistance from SAS users are quickly and effectively answered. Sales folks use Twitter to develop and nurture prospects. Each product line and industry vertical has a branded Twitter stream run by marketers to share information and promote events. Individual marketers use Twitter to communicate and stay in touch with their networks and gather market intelligence. External Comms folks use it to tell stories (see below) and to further relationships.

Video

Short-form video is incorporated into all of our marketing and external communications activities. Our goal is to tell stories and share fun and interesting information that reflects well on SAS and supports our marketing message. For much of our video communication we value speed, relevance and interest over production values. Marketers and communicators are given clear guidelines and trusted to post video directly without review. We don't try to go "viral," we try to be interesting, genuine and informative. Marketers and communicators become proficient in shooting video themselves, using simple editing tools, and posting video to a blog, social network page or YouTube. We figure prominently in key search terms related to our business on YouTube, like analytics and business intelligence.

External Communications

Members of the External Communications team, both in Marketing Editorial and PR, act as journalists and storytellers, finding unique stories and presenting them in a variety of media. Every member of the team contributes regularly to a blog, on Twitter and in social networks. Every member of the team has a video camera or video-enabled smart phone and uses it to shoot video and post it to YouTube. Instead of writing pitches for stories, we write stories. Instead of writing traditional customer success stories for the web, we tell our customers' stories in whatever medium is best suited. We transition to a social media release format for press releases, on the way to abandoning press releases altogether, in favor of sharing our stories with the audiences we develop ourselves, which may include journalists as well as customers and prospects and the community as a whole.


Photo by me

Lots of people are understandably concerned about Facebook's recent changes to privacy settings, and what's now indexed by search engines and publicly available. In fact, quite a few of my Facebook friends have posted this as their status today:

Check this out: If you don't know, as of today, Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. To change this option, go to Settings --> Privacy Settings --> Search --> then UN-CLICK the box that says 'Allow indexing'.

I won't go into all the details but here's a summary of the situation on Mashable along with warnings from the ACLU and security experts. In short, Facebook is encouraging users to share their information with "Everyone," in an effort to make more content searchable, and therefore more valuable.

Me, I'm not so worried, but I've chosen to live a fair amount of my life in public. I'm not advising you on whether or not you should or shouldn't. But here's one thing many people may not know about that will give you some solid information on which to base your decision:

While you're logged in to Facebook, go to Settings - Privacy Settings - Search. Look in the upper right hand corner. See that button that says "Preview My Profile"? Click on it.

That shows you how your profile looks to somehow who is not a Facebook friend of yours but finds you via search, based on your current privacy settings. You can also see how your profile looks to individual friends by typing in their name. If you're fine with what you see being public, then you've got nothing to worry about.

If you think you're sharing too much, then it's time to modify your privacy settings. The video embedded in that Mashable article, produced by security firm Sophos, shows you a good primer on how to do that.

These changes have been called everything from a brilliant business move to an evil plot. It's up to you to decide for yourself, and this tool will help you do it based on facts.

I’ve been working on this post a bit at a time over the course of a few weeks. In the meantime, Amber Naslund posted a compelling argument why she doesn’t want to write a list of social media predictions for 2010.

But I’d much rather spend my efforts at the end of a year planning what I can and will do, instead of musing about what may happen (and that’s typically out of my control).

An excellent point and a valuable call to action for social media practitioners. And I think I will consider it the very moment I finish my...

Social Media Predictions for 2010

The heyday of the Social Media Manager

This will be a growth year for jobs with titles like mine (social media manager). We’ll see more companies hiring people to create strategies, implement policies and coordinate social media activities. Hopefully those people will have a background in marketing or marketing communications and an understanding of how marcomm supports sales and marketing efforts, and not just a Twitter handle.

We’ll start to figure out the methodology and the staffing and the workflow, and be able to track a tweet to a lead to a sale. It will be hard work, but this is the year we’ll come to terms with it.

Some of the people who take social media manager jobs won’t even know that Chris Brogan thinks it’s a silly title, and that leads to my next prediction…

Cracks in the fishbowl

In 2009, nearly every social media practitioner I knew was connected to one another on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, read one another’s blogs and shook hands like old friends (whether or not they’d ever actually met) at events like BlogWorld or the Inbound Marketing Summits. Many people refer to that as the “fishbowl,” and it’s an accurate metaphor.

In 2010, we’ll see more and more people active in social media who aren’t swimming in that bowl, and even if they know it exists, might not be peering in. There are plenty of traditional marketers these days who aren’t reading marketing blogs or falling asleep at night with the latest marketing book on their chests. In the future, not every social media practitioner will be a geek and a zealot.

This is a two-edged sword: Getting some new ideas and perspectives will be beneficial, but I’m afraid we’ll start to see some lessening of the passion as well. And a lot of charlatans.

Spammers, scammers, and your mom

Tired of DM spam in Twitter? Noise? Too many friends? Foursquare updates from people you’ve never met? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 2010 must be the year we put practical strategies in place to filter through the chaff. We’re exactly where we were in the early days of email. We need to get on top of the problem in social media before it’s too late.

We chill a little

I’ve spent as much time in 2009 talking to people about the hazards of participating in social media as I have talking about the benefits. Corporate marketers, lawyers, HR folks and brand cops are still pretty worried about what might happen. I’m hoping that as 2010 rolls along, we’ll relax a bit and start to get on with it. Although there will inevitably be some fresh horror stories along with more positive case studies.

We tuck in our shirts

At one conference this year I spoke to a social media consultant who seemed interested in working with SAS. He was wearing a ball cap, a shiny disco shirt and a five-day stubble. As I’ve said recently and often, I used to work in the music industry, so I’m perfectly comfortable with the concept of a smart and hard-working professional who dresses like a teenager. But other people I work with are at different stages of their acceptance in that regard. I remember thinking, “If I bring this guy on campus at SAS, people will think I’m trying to sneak in my dealer.”

Chris Brogan owns the dissheveled pirate thing. David Armano has a trademark on the cowboy hat. Jason Falls is the shouty, downhome guy. Geno and Spike from Brains on Fire are… um… Geno and Spike. They are all great folks, have proven themselves, are masters of their craft and can do what they want.

If you’re a social media consultant hoping to get enterprise work in 2010, don’t think about your shtick, just focus on what problems you can solve. And tuck in your shirt.

We define ROI

Return on investment. Return on influence. Return on engagement. We must define ROI. We must not define ROI. Blah blah blah. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The only measure that matters to the people I most need to influence is how much software we sold compared to how much money we spent. It is my profound hope and optimistic prediction that in 2010, we start to come to terms with what social media ROI actually means, and we find a straightforward and compelling way to demonstrate it.

Photo by me

Jeff Cohen, a Triangle-area social media consultant and one of the brains behind the Social Media B2B blog, has put together a short PowerPoint presentation on his Slideshare page highlighting B2B companies that have created successful Facebook fan pages, with a summary of what makes each one good. It's an excellent starting point for any B2B marketer wondering how to use Facebook.

One of my favorite podcasts is Media Hacks, which features Mitch Joel, C.C. Chapman, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, Hugh McGuire, and Christopher S. Penn discussing a loose agenda of topics spanning social media, marketing, technology and the ways we create and consume content in the modern world. On one episode, for instance, they debated the question, “What is a book?”

I often learn new things from the podcast, but I enjoy it more as a peek into the social media zeitgeist. Plus, the vibe is more like sitting around a bar with a group of smart, funny, enthusiastic friends than like a seminar.

On their most recent episode, Mitch said he occasionally gets complaints from listeners about the “NSFW” (not safe for work) language they sometimes use. Julien especially likes to shoehorn the F-word into every conversational nook and cranny.

The question they pondered was whether or not they should be worried. Here’s how they described it in the show notes:

• Grappling with the use of naughty language and how it can affect both reputation and growing audience.
  
• Is swearing and "Selling out" related?

I have no problem with strong language. I worked in the music industry for several years before coming to SAS. People at the record label seemed to use swearing as an auditory reminder, both to the speaker and the listener, that they weren’t working for “the man.” The Media Hacks crew touched on that in the “selling out” discussion.

But I have a different perspective as someone who now works inside a large company. On many occasions I’ve wanted to forward episodes of Media Hacks to colleagues because they were discussing a topic directly related to what we do. Every time I’ve had to stop and wonder if there was swearing in what I was sending, and if I thought the recipient would be offended. Sometimes I haven’t been sure and haven’t forwarded the content.

Does that mean I’m too uptight? Too concerned about superficial things like etiquette rather than the value of the content? No, that means I work for a large company, that, like every other large company, has HR policies and conduct guidelines.

It’s not just that I don’t want to break the rules. I don’t want to offend anyone, make them feel uncomfortable or, at a stage where I’m trying to convince people that social media is an important tool for business, give them a reason to dismiss it as unprofessional.

On several occasions I’ve been asked to recommend social media speakers for events. I’ve tempered my recommendations based on what I know of the speaker’s public persona. I would not recommend a speaker to one of our large executive events who I knew was going to stalk up and down the stage shouting obscenities.

So my answer to you, dear hacks, is yes, swearing can affect both your reputation and your growing audience. I’m not saying you should necessarily care about that. I’m not judging you or wagging a finger.

I’m just telling you that right now, you’re NSFW. Whether or not you want to be SFW is up to you.