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IBM's Sandy Carter says businesses need to understand the value of internal social media networks -- or get left behind.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Sandy Carter is vice president of social business sales at IBM. Global market intelligence firm IDC recently ranked IBM the #1 enterprise social software vendor worldwide.

(CNN) -- It's a well known fact that the social networking phenomena has had a profound effect on society. Consumer social networks continue to creep into the workplace as many companies are encouraging and allowing the use of Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest during business hours.

But what's new is that this shift is now causing a ripple effect in the business world.

Socializing the workplace is no longer about conversations at the water cooler, chatting about team deliverables, client leads and pipelines. With the emergence of social networking platforms, socializing the workplace means that an organization has embraced a platform that allows its employees to share ideas and expertise, connect with colleagues, customers and business partners across the globe and gain actionable insight from social data that provides them with the ability to make smarter business decisions faster than ever before.

Forrester Research estimates that the market opportunity for social software is expected to exceed $6 billion by 2016, an increase of 60% annually from 2010. IBM's recent CEO Study reports that only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers today, but that number is poised to spike to 57% within the next three to five years.

If your organization plans to stay competitive, it can't afford to ignore the impact of social on the workplace. Sandy Carter, IBM

How do you quantify the ROI (return on investment) of Social Business?

The ROI of social business is a topic for debate, as many of the benefits extend beyond just a company's bottom line. Enterprise social networking tools are fundamentally changing the processes through which we do business and in the past year, we've progressed from just talking about the idea of a social business to companies reporting real and tangible business outcomes from collaborative practices.

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Opinion: Boost business, let your workers socialize online

Cisco Systems is extending the functionality of its Quad enterprise social networking (ESN) software through integration with Microsoft Office applications and with email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, the company is announcing on Tuesday.

Cisco is also re-branding the ESN software, dropping its Quad name and calling it WebEx Social, as the company seeks to give its social collaboration products a uniform brand using the WebEx name.

"Creating a consistent [collaboration] brand and experience under WebEx is a necessary thing for them to do," said industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.

Cisco is also placing under the WebEx umbrella its Callway cloud-hosted telepresence service, the original WebEx online meeting and Web conferencing service, and the cloud-based Connect IM and presence service. Callway will now be known as WebEx Telepresence, while WebEx will be called WebEx Meetings, and Connect is being renamed WebEx Messenger.

"There's no doubt that Cisco had too many [collaboration] platforms. That's how they grew the business, through acquisitions," Kerravala said.

WebEx Social, like other ESN applications from companies like IBM, Jive Software, Tibbr and Yammer, lets organizations offer their employees Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality but adapted for a workplace setting so that they can, in theory, communicate and collaborate more effectively.

ESN software is designed to complement traditional workplace communication and collaboration tools, like email, IM and Web conferencing with employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, discussion forums, wikis, brainstorming software, recommendations, ratings, joint document editing and annotation, tagging and links.

Interest in ESN software has been growing in recent years, and Forrester Research recently forecasted that spending on these products will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which this market will reach US$6.4 billion, compared with $600 million in 2010.

Kerravala predicts that ESN will be one of the biggest trends in IT over the next five years. "It will change the way people work," he said.

ESN will be used for many communication and collaboration tasks for which email is ineffective. "It will create a much more interactive way of working than what you have now with email," he said.

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Cisco Upgrades Quad Enterprise Social Product, Renames It WebEx Social

Symantec talks social-networking threats and how a new Norton Labs tool called App Advisor will stop them from attacking you.

Norton Labs' App Advisor scans your social networks for these kind of attacks, and blocks them.

SAN FRANCISCO--Symantec detailed some of the dirty secrets of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ threats at its annual reviewers' workshop here today, and revealed a planned project to protect you from social networking manipulators.

The project from Norton Labs, currently called Norton App Advisor, combines Norton's Safe Web data with social network open API data to provide a safety rating for apps. It aims to prevent malicious apps that prey on your social network activity from collecting data on you and your friends, which Symantec representatives said was a major security concern.

"Social networks have a trust model built in, to trust posts from their friends. This trust model gets exploited by attackers, and it's difficult to distinguish between a post from a friend and a post from an attack," said Nishant Doshi, architect for Symantec's security response group that deals with browsers. He explained that the attacks are successful because they go viral, just like your latest favorite Nyan Cat video. They start small and spread fast.

There are basically three major kinds of attacks that show up on your social networking feeds, he told CNET. One is drive-by downloads, which is basically when somebody downloads ostensibly legit software that has malicious consequences for the host computer, or the malicious software download occurs without the person's knowledge.

Another threat would be a prompt to begin a download that looks like a required plug-in, such as QuickTime or Flash, but is actually malware.

The third kind of threat that Doshi discussed is a survey scam. The scam asks you to fill out a survey that looks like a legitimate personal information survey, but in fact takes your data and uses it in ways that you didn't think you were authorizing. "Once they get a [cell phone] number, they place telemarketing calls to you, sign you up for a [premium SMS] subscription service, or just sell the information [to data collection companies.] They're trying everything," he lamented.

It's essentially premium SMS spam that you've been conned into legally agreeing to.

These surveys use "gray" marketing to appear above-board when collecting personal identity data, then flip it to turn you into money, said Gerry Egan, senior director of product management for Norton. "It's a little bit like spam on steroids. If a scammer can figure out how to seed a scam on a social network, then it goes from a trickle to a flood in a very short amount of time," he said.

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How attacks on social networks work

By LISA CORNWELL Associated Press

CINCINNATI (AP) - A man who says he was charged with disorderly conduct after using the word "crippled" to promote a comedian with muscular dystrophy claims Cincinnati police violated his free speech rights, and the comedian agrees.

Forest Thomer, of Cold Spring, Ky., is to appear in a Cincinnati courtroom on the charge Wednesday. He was cited by Cincinnati police last month at a park after he and comedian Ally Bruener say he asked people if they wanted to "laugh at the crippled girl."

The question was not intended to demean his friend Bruener, but to promote her next comedy show and her allybruener.com website, the two said Monday. Bruener, who is in a wheelchair because of the degenerative muscle disorder, said she would approach people after Thomer asked them the question, tell a joke and talk about her next performance. Thomer also would record some of the public's responses for use on Bruener's website, showing people saying: "I laughed at the crippled girl."

Thomer, 25, was cited May 23 on a disorderly conduct charge alleging that he walked into people and shouted obscenities at them, according to court records. Thomer was asked to stop his behavior but "persisted in yelling and shouting, causing annoyance and alarm to others," according to the complaint in Hamilton County Municipal Court. Thomer could face up to 30 days in jail if convicted of the fourth degree misdemeanor charge, a court official said.

"We were just going up to people and asking the question, said Thomer, who denies all of the allegations.

"You can't just arrest people or have them arrested just because you don't like what they are saying," Thomer said.

Lt. Anthony Carter, a Cincinnati police spokesman, declined to comment. The city prosecutor did not immediately return calls for comment.

Bruener, 23, of Alexandria, Ky., said "people are trying to be too politically correct and force us to be as well."

The idea was to get people's attention and help them "let down their guard a bit," said Bruener, who says she uses her humor to try to remove any stigma from the word "crippled."

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Ohio comedy promoter: Cited for 'crippled' quip

June 19, 2012, 8:48 AM PDT

Takeaway: You can delete a problematic AutoCorrect entry or you can try this case shuffling trick to have your cake and eat it too.

Words AutoCorrect feature is helpful, most of the time. When users run into a problem, they usually delete the AutoCorrect item. For instance, if you routinely enter TEH, you could delete the AutoCorrect item that corrects TEH to THE-eliminating the problem altogether.

Deleting the item wont always be the right choice, however. The copyright symbol is a good example of an item thats useful, but that can create an unusual problem. Lets suppose you enter the phrase 501(c) a lot. Words AutoCorrect feature automatically replaces (c) with the copyright symbol (). You can press [Ctrl]+Z, but that gets old after awhile. You could delete the AutoCorrect item, but then you cant use it to enter a copyright symbol.

You dont have to choose, but the solution isnt intuitive. The AutoCorrect item will replace the (c) combo whether the c is lower or upper case. By adjusting the existing item to replace only (C), you can keep the AutoCorrect entry and also still enter the literal string (c). To make this change, do the following:

Now you have a reasonable compromise. You can type (c) without triggering the AutoCorrect change, and to enter the copyright symbol, you type (C). You can use the upper/lower case shuffle in most cases where you need to enter an AutoCorrect replace value without triggering AutoCorrect.

If you accidentally delete the actual symbol from the AutoCorrect list, you can re-enter it by holding down the [Alt] key while pressing 0169 on your numeric keyboard. (Press [NumLock] first.)

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Tweak an annoying AutoCorrect entry instead of deleting it outright