New employment law bans use of social media

The Genetic Information Non-Discrimination (GINA) Act takes effect today and according to experts on the law, will prohibit employers from reviewing Facebook etc. for information about a job candidate’s genetic information.

Facebook sued by Sacramento law firm

Facebook and Zynga, a company that allows users to play games on Facebook and other social networking sites are being sued by the firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff for misleading advertising promoted by these companies in a Federal class action filed in the Northern District of California.  Last week, the Kershaw law firm signalled that likelihood of this suit.

One of the plaintiff’s in the case, Rebecca Swift, says she was repeatedly charged $9.99 after she divulged her cell to a Zynga advertiser, and she was the hit with $165.85 even after she attempted to terminate a “trial offer” of green tea products.

Outlook to soon incorporate social networking

According to this Wall Street Journal article, Microsoft says its 2010 version of Outlook will include a window allows users to review information about the email sender like: their photo on Facebook etc, what they are saying on Twitter and other social networking sites.

What will this mean?  This should compell more people with client-facing postions (like lawyers, for example)  to more fully utilize social networking, monitor their own profile, photo and messaging.  They will want to make sure that they are presenting themselves in the best possible light on social networking services.

It will also blur the line between the private and public spheres.  People who have used to Facebook or Twitter to just have fun may need to re-think that approach.

SCIP is great!

Not only do they link one of my blog posts from their home page but they also provide links to great competitive intelligence articles from all over the web.  And I touted their website in my talk this week on competitive intelligence in San Francisco and pointed to several references I found there as resources.

Thanks SCIP (Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals)!

Salesforce goes Facebook

CEO Marc Benioff presented the company’s new “Salesforce Chatter” which is a social networking tool for enterprise use.  I have two questions:

1.  Will this service be sold as enterprise Facebook/LinkedIn without some of the risks of making private information public?

2.  Will enterprises that partner with one another be able to share functionality across their Salesforce platforms?

Social networking challenges the law

This article outlines for a mainstream audience some of the issues that the law hasn’t kept pace with when it comes to social networking.

For example, if a Facebook network include a number of co-workers and one of them is offended by what another co-worker says on their profile, does harrassment laws apply and could the company be liable?

Twitter face patent suit & other troubles

Twitter is one of three companies sued by Cooper Notification in Delaware Federal court.

More bad news:  the latest reports has Twitters growth dropping 8% in October from the month before.

Twitter’s political potency can’t be doubted

There are debates about how useful Twitter is for business but this story should make clear just how powerful Twitter is on the political landscape.

Twitter has a select list of suggested people to follow and it seems that until recently that list tilted Democratic, particularly in California where Republicans running for Governor were kept off the list. 

That’s been corrected and Meg Whitman, who is running on the Republican ticket for governor, saw her followers shoot up to more than 61,000 followers after being added to the list.  Before she had about 4,000.

More significantly, the outcry about the alleged Twitter bias has prompted the California Fair Political Practices Commission to announce hearing on whether it need to regulate how social networking are involved in political campaigns.

Google takes on Lexis and Westlaw

Not quite but Google has added free case law to its Google Scholar offering.  Quickly searching this database I was struck by two things:

*In terms of content, this is a limited database which could serve as a quick and cheap alternative when I need to find out something about a legal issue.  It isn’t appropriate for any question when the goal is to be exhaustive. 

*The Google interface is far superior to anything the proprietary legal vendors offer.  It’s very straightforward and easy to use in a way that I hope is keeping Lexis and Westlaw product developers up at night.

Use iGoogle for competitive intelligence

iGoogle allows users to create landing pages for just about anything Google has created an app for and more.  One of the things I use it for is to quickly monitor news about competitors and clients.  And because this is Google, it’s all free.

Basic how-to:

Go to the iGoogle page and if this is your first visit to iGoogle you will see a big button that says, “Look for new stuff to add” which will take you to page full of gadgets you can easily insert into your iGoogle page.  There is also a search button that allows you to find things to add to your page.

Next, search on “alerts” and this will bring up a Google news box that you can customize and add to your page. 

Now you face a question: do you want to load all these news alerts to your one iGoogle tab or create specific tabs for specific activities?  I chose the latter approach and have created a tab called, “Top ten clients.”   To create a tab you open the down arrow to the right of your “Home” label and click on last pull down item, “add a tab.”

A box will come up and you can give this tab any name you want.  It will then save it as a link below your iGoogle home tab.  You can open this tab and start setting up custom Google news searches on your top clients.  The results will display on this page under a label for each client (you create the label) and Google news will stream its most recent news for these clients.  You can display anywhere from 1 to 9 items.  It defaults at three and I chose to see five.  I find it a lot easier to monitor news at a glance rather than have alerts come to my email where I have to open them up individually and scan through them.

Tip:  don’t just follow these instructions.  Play around with iGoogle yourself and I’ll bet you quickly will find uses that work better for you or can improve this approach.  iGoogle is not only very powerful but also lots of fun.

Remember:  I will be speaking about competitive intelligence for law firms in San Francisco tomorrow.