Communication Technology

Scottish teachers are being warned that their use of social networking sites could put their careers at risk.

The Scottish Secondary Teachers Association believes teachers can reveal too much personal information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The union also fears they could become overly familiar with pupils.

For more details see: Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use (BBC News).

The BBC News web site ran a writing in the week a few Tweeting taxi driver in Thailand.

It would appear such activities have turned the taxi driver into to a small degree a neighborhood and international celebrity.

To browse additional and consider a video see however tweeting Thai taxi driver scooped world media 

According to a recent article courtesy of the New York Times it is.

However, the criticism is restricted and needs to be reasonable as the follow section of the article suggests:

...Labor law specialists say employees have the right to criticize or disparage their companies or supervisors as part of a conversation aimed at improving working conditions, but do not have the right to merely curse supervisors or make untrue, disloyal statements that damage a company’s reputation...

For more details see Labor Panel to Press Reuters Over Reaction to Twitter Post by Steven Greenhouse.

Thanks to Union Renewal blog for story.

Two Web 2.0 and work stories in the news just recently.

The first is from Australia and involves the use of social networking sites to discuss employment matters:

The Commonwealth Bank in Australia has been forced to rethink its social media policy after revelations that staff could be disciplined or even sacked if their friends criticised the bank on sites such as Facebook...

Social media policy goes bad at Commonwealth Bank (Cath Everett, HR Zone).

The second concerns whether Twittered messages are in the public domain:

Material that is published on Twitter should be considered public and can be published, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has ruled.

The decision follows a complaint by a Department of Transport official that the use of her tweets by newspapers constituted an invasion of privacy...

'Twitter messages not private' rules PCC (BBC News).

Two stories recently emerged of disgruntled professional football players letting off some steam on Twitter.

Aldershot Town striker Marvin Morgan has been placed on the transfer list following a message he posted on social networking website Twitter... - see Aldershot's Marvin Morgan transfer listed over tweet (BBC News).

And...

Players' chief Gordon Taylor has described the Football Association as "very precious" for charging Liverpool winger Ryan Babel over Twitter posts... - see PFA's Gordon Taylor defends Ryan Babel's Twitter posts (BBC News).

And footballers wonder why people roll their eyes when they refer to themselves as "professionals"!

According to BBC News website, Greater Manchester Police have set up a 24-hour Twitter feed so every call it receives can be made public.

More details:

The feed has revealed the extremely varied nature of emergency calls the force receives.

One minute someone is calling about a baby being dangled over a bridge - although later it turns out that it was a dog.

Shortly afterwards, the force receives another 999 call about fireworks being set off in a local park.

Then another call is received about a missing mother and son, and at the same time another operator is taking down details of a missing person who has been found.

Another tweet from a member of the public congratulates the police on the finding the missing woman, then a second later there's a robbery in Salford to attend to.

For more details see Greater Manchester Police tweets sparking interest.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a Korean company is experimenting with Twitter as a means to communicate with and between its 7,000 strong workforce.

Some brief details:

...At LG CNS, a group of developers who maintain the company's array of internal message boards, employee blogs and databases decided the Twitter-style service could provide a means for mass communication that was less formal than email and less technical than postings on topic-oriented bulletin boards.

The group of employees took several of the key Twitter APIs and built BizTweet on LG CNS's internal network. Last month, they invited 1,000 employees to test BizTweet.

What has emerged, they say, is a real-time public conversation in the company.

On Monday, the company made BizTweet available to all of its employees, and they posted more than 300 messages...

For more detail see Korean Firm Tweaks Twitter for Workers by Evan Ramstad.

BBC News ran an article earlier the week detailing four cases of how Twitter led to work-related problems.

What prompted the article was almost certainly the case of Derek Simpson - joint leader of UNITE union - Twittering away during ACAS talks with British Airways.

See Be careful what you tweet by Will Smale for more details.

According to the BBC News website over the weekend:

US troops are to be allowed to use social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook following a review of internet use and security.

Defence department officials say the benefits of using social media now outweigh the risks to security.

The ruling means that a number of sites blocked by the Pentagon in 2007 - including YouTube - will be unblocked.

However, commanders will be able to temporarily block access to safeguard missions or save bandwidth.

Correspondents say social media and the internet are becoming increasingly important for the US military.

The web is used for recruitment, public relations and for communications between troops and their families, among other things.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said that social networking can help the Pentagon interact with US military employees, many of whom are in their early 20s and regular users of online services.

For more details see Twitter and Facebook access for US troops.

Courtesy of HR Zone:

The rogue employee, who has been suspended until further notice, used the mobile phone operator’s official account to post a message saying: “Vodafone UK is fed up of dirty homo’s [sic] and is going after beaver.”

The company uses Twitter to deal with customer service complaints and within minutes of the message appearing on Friday, hundreds of its 8,824 followers contacted it to ask whether its account had been hacked.

Vodafone deleted the message from its Twitterfeed within minutes, but copies quickly made their way around the internet and the firm was forced to issue hundreds of individual apologies to users, saying that it had not been hacked.

Instead it said that the situation arose due to a “severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. We’re very sorry”.

The obscene tweet is understood to have come from Vodafone’s customer service centre in Stoke, where its web team uses a range of social networking sites to provide generally less contentious technical advice and new product information.

Vodafone is launching an internal investigation into the incident.

But it is not the first time that such sites have been used by staff in such an inappropriate fashion.

A year ago, for example, Virgin Atlantic sacked 13 of its cabin crew after they used Facebook to call passengers ‘chavs’ and claimed that the airline’s planes were full of cockroaches.