Mediaboss Marketing

When a major Canadian telecommunications company wanted to change how it handles employee training, it turned to social networking.

Telus, based in Vancouver, had long run formal programs -- mostly classes and lectures -- to train its 35,000 employees around the world, but found they were becoming a bit too stiff, said Dan Pontefract, head of learning and collaboration.

Some workers have difficulty learning in formal settings, and can better master new tasks by communicating directly with friends and colleagues.

Learning, after all, is social, says Pontefrac. The training should be social as well, he added.

"We always thought training was an event," he said. "It was something that you went to. We had a plethora of formal learning options."

However, Pontefrac added. "That's just not the only way people learn."

Now, Telus offers a combination of learning tools for its workers. "We didn't throw classroom learning out with the bathwater, but we made it a piece of a bigger pie that included informal and social," he said

The Telus training philosophy is now broken down into the three broad categories.

Formal training refers to any self-contained event that people go to, such as a lecture or classroom course.

Informal training refers to live Webcasts, podcasts or mentoring.

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Telus links social, traditional training

Coimbatore, March 23:

Social-networking fever appears to be fast catching up among Indian corporates, too.

A survey on the usage habits of social media by business executives has revealed that a majority of them spend anywhere between 30 minutes to six hours every day on sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Skype and Google+ from their notebook PCs, smartphones and tablets.

The study titled Social Media Usage Habits of Business Executives in India' by CyberMedia Research shows that 88 per cent of the executives use social media primarily as a tool for better professional networking, 75 per cent for social networking and only around 15 per cent for finding new career or employment opportunities.

The time spent online by Indian executives runs up to six hours in a day. This has raised concerns about loss of time and productivity. However, our study reveals that at the workplace, social media is being increasingly used by professionals for multitasking and for better time management. Our survey respondents feel that social networking tools help them communicate faster, with a larger audience in a relatively shorter time span, said Mr Anirban Banerjee, Associate Vice-President, Research and Advisory Services.

LinkedIn appears to be the most popular site for professional interaction followed by Twitter and Skype. Facebook is being increasingly used for social communication, replacing other forms of communications gradually.

The survey findings further showed that notebook PCs remained the most preferred medium for accessing social platforms until recently. The use of smartphones to access social networks now beats that of desktop PCs both at workplace and home.

Social media use is found to have resulted in decrease of email communications. The survey respondents indicated a preference for social networking tools over email for business communications.

Similarly, SMS or text messaging has taken a hit with the ascent of social media. Phone use, though, is least affected by the rise of social media.

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Business communication shifting to social media

March 27, 2012, 7:30 AM PDT

Takeaway: Jack Wallen says employees should have access to social networking sites at work. See if you agree with his reasoning and take our poll to let us know where you stand.

I get it Youre completely convinced that allowing your employees to get on Facebook and Twitter would pull the rug out from under your bottom line. Because of that, you block chat, tweets, and all other social networking to make sure your workers are doing only what you pay them for. I am here, however, to suggest that there can be a backlash from that approach. Social networking can actually help you in the long run, and I want to try to open your eyes to this fact. In the end, of course, its your business and your call. But lets see if you can be swayed.

Back in the 90s, people wanted to be hired by companies that were cool to work for. And when the employees actually enjoyed working for a company, they did their best work. Morale is a huge aspect of the business world, but few owners and managers seem to get it. Low morale among the workers breeds contempt, and contempt breeds disloyalty. Disloyalty, as you know, breeds attrition.

Your reputation is everything in business. And in this day of instant gratification and notification, finding yourself with a reputation going down the drain is little more than a disgruntled employee away. That does not mean you must cater to every whim and folly of your employees. But giving them tiny crumbs (like social media access) will go a long way toward keeping your reputation healthy.

Communication whether its internal or external is key to business success. One of the fastest means of communication today is social networking. In fact, its just about the most immediate form of communication you can find. Your employees may be communicating with the outside world, but many of those people on the outside are consumers and possible clients.

Dare I say free advertising? I dare and I do. Social networking brings to businesses a boon of free advertising. You cant afford not to hop onto this bandwagon. And getting on board early shows the public that you are an agile, aware company. Allowing your employees to take advantage of social networking also shows you care about them. In this society, caring goes a long way. All of that makes for some seriously powerful advertising.

Social networking facilitates collaboration internally, but it also lets users collaborate with the entire world. I have done this countless times. When Ive been stuck on an idea, I call out to my followers on Twitter or Facebook to get a deluge of answers. Its free and its fast.

You need your finger on the pulse of society. You can get this with your employees on social networking sites. In fact, youll have instant access to the court of public opinion even as it evolves in front of you. This is another (free) way to expand your companys reach.

Your company and its employees need to know how to use social networking effectively. Why? Because our society is on a collision course with an even further embedding of social media into our lives. You want your company and your employees at the forefront of that trend. At some point, your employees may have to use social networking to market and sell your product. Allowing them to use it on a daily basis now will ensure that theyre social media savvy, without the need for training.

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10 reasons NOT to block social networking at work

By Patricia Reaney

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Most of the world is interconnected thanks to email and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, according to a new poll released on Tuesday.

Eighty five percent of people around the globe who are connected online send and receive emails and 62 percent communicate through social networking sites, particularly in Indonesia, Argentina and Russia, which have the highest percentage of users.

More than eight in 10 Indonesians and about 75 percent of people in Argentina, Russia and South Africa visit social media sites, the new Ipsos/Reuters poll showed.

Although Facebook and other popular social networking sites, blogs and forums, were founded in the United States the percentage of users was lower at six in 10, and in Japan it fell to 35 percent, the lowest of the 24 countries in the global survey.

"Even though the number in the United States was 61 percent, the majority of Americans are using social media sites," said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs.

The fact that more than six in 10 people worldwide use social networks and forums, she added, suggests a transformation in how people communicate with each other.

"It is true interconnection and engagement with each other. It is not just about a message back and forth but building messages across communities and only the meaningful messages stick," she explained.

"It looks like a majority of the world is communicating this way," she said, adding the numbers were more than half in almost every country polled.

Ipsos questioned a total of 19,216 adults around the world in the online survey.

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Most of world interconnected through email, social media

The advent of highly resistant bacteria or "superbugs" was one of the issues discussed at the Society for General Microbiology's Spring Conference currently being held in Dublin between 26-29 March. An important aspect of the meet was to bring forth new research that focused on combating the advent of superbugs or drug-resistant bacterial strains.

A logic proposed was to use viruses called bacteriophages to wipe out bacterial strains that are resistant to the current crop of antibiotics. The growing menace of accelerated antibiotic resistance has added to the woes of the medical fraternity in combating bacterial diseases that remain resistant to existing antibiotics.

This has reduced the number of potent antibiotics for treating drug-resistant diseases. The novel bacteriophage therapy could be the answer to the growing "superbug" malady. New research has re-investigated the characteristics of bacteriophages as the potential "killer" virus that has the ability to infect drug-resistant bacteria by multiplying within the bacterial cells and breaking them down.

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In the process, the virus itself enhances its own inner mechanism to deal better with other bacterial strains. The bacteriophages are widely present in the environment such as rivers, water, soil, the human body and sewage. The new idea is to tap these viruses.

"Each bacteriophage is highly specific to a certain type of bacteria and needs the right bacterial host cell in order to multiply. The more bacterial targets there are, the quicker they grow by killing the host cells. Therefore it seems very likely that infections harboring high numbers of bacteria will benefit most from bacteriophage therapy - for example chronically infected ears, lungs and wounds," explained Dr. David Harper at the the Dublin meet. He is the Chief Scientific Officer at AmpliPhi Bioscience, Bedfordshire, that has conducted clinical trials on bacteriophages since 2005.

"For these types of infection, only a tiny dose of the virus is needed - as small as one thousandth of a millionth of a gram. This can usually be administered directly to the site of infection in a spray, drops or a cream. The major advantage to bacteriophages is that they don't infect human cells so seem likely to be very safe to use," Harper added.

Bacteriophages, discovered initially in 1915, were seen as mere anti-bacterial therapeutic agents but a lack of understanding on their mode of action failed to pave the way for future investigations as anti-bacterial agents. With the advent of new-age chemical variants of anti-bacterial drugs, the viral impact on bacteria remained ignored.

"The rate of new antibiotics coming onto the market does not match the rate of increasing drug-resistance. The need for new approaches to counter such high resistance is both urgent and vital. New approaches will save lives," added Harper.

Harper is positive on the results of clinical trials and said that once regulatory issues are taken care of and enough funds are generated to secure this area of research on bacteriophages, the development of the novel viral-based antibacterial agents would be a step to curb the prevailing crisis of drug-resistant antibiotics.

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New Study Explores Virus To Fight Superbugs