ReadWriteEnterprise

If you are trying to plan out your enterprise's social media activities, it helps to have a playbook. Several companies have produced such a document, ranging from a few pages to more extensive tomes, and I wanted to give you some tips to preparing your own, as well as talk about best practices.

Perhaps the most famous and most public playbook is one that surfaced two years ago from social media tracking vendor Eloqua, which is available from their website here. In it you can find more than 40 pages of advice, with about half of its pages on using Twitter. There is also information on Facebook, with additional information on other social media platforms. It very dispassionately provides advantages and disadvantages to each platform, along with a more extensive discussion on how you can use social media to cultivate leads.

The good folks at Backupify.com have put together this interesting infographic this week that attempts to calculate what an individual Tweet, Facebook user and other social media elements are actually worth in dollars and cents. And perhaps to no one's surprise, the most expensive item is an individual review on Yelp. This was done by dividing total company revenue by the amount of pieces of content. Given that many of us are paid per blog post, there is some method to this metric.

Also not surprisingly, given its anticipated valuation, each Facebook user is worth more than $100, the most of the nine services examined.

Dell has been busy this week. Today they announced the acquisition of Clerity, a mainframe migration and modernization solution provider, and the intent to fold them into their services division. Clerity is one of the leaders in mainframe "rehosting" or the ability to migrate apps from legacy mainframes to equipment elsewhere that can provide the same service at reduced cost.

Yesterday, the company announced they would acquire Wyse Technology, which sells thin clients and cloud management and desktop virtualization (DVI) management software tools. Wyse also has a huge patent portfolio and has been around since the early days of the PC era. Back then, they sold low-cost green-screen terminals and became second only to IBM in that market. They used this expertise to move into selling thin clients that first worked with Windows Terminal Servers and eventually became more DVI-oriented.

Yes, you read that correctly. According to Barracuda Labs, two out of the top 25,000 domains (at least top of Alexa's rankings) serve up some tasty and annoying malware to their visitors. Hopefully, this is unintentional and the result of some compromise. The lab rats found that more than 10 million folks were exposed to exploits in February, and almost every day there was a new compromised website. The top-ranked domains that served malicious content spanned across 18 different countries, demonstrating that this problem has no geographic barrier. Making matters worse, almost all of the compromised sites were at least a year old, and half were more than five years old. This indicates that attackers use well-established, long-lived websites for their drive-by download campaigns.

The researchers used an automated script to bring up a series of URLs inside a virtual Windows VM and observe what happens to its OS, plug-ins, and other browser settings. Once the site is visited, the VM's network traffic is monitored to see what malware has been placed on it.

On the link on their blog post is more information on their methodology and the complete infographic, which we have truncated here in the interests of readability.

There's been a bit of a firestorm lately over employers seeking Facebook passwords. Despite the outrage, employers occasionally have a legitimate need for access to documents in their employees' social network and online service accounts. Cernam, a company that specializes in digital investigations, is looking to help employers dive into employees accounts without abusing the privacy of employees.

As I mentioned recently, I had a feeling there'd be a business in providing this sort of access to employee accounts. But I wasn't thinking along the lines of forensic searches.

If you are part of your company's IT organization, chances are you wish you would have had this infographic that explains some of the basics about social media security a lot sooner.

With lots of celebrities and ordinary people getting their accounts compromised, there are several basic strategies that can make you more secure. And we aren't talking about crafting stronger passwords, although that will certainly help matters. Here are some of the more important issues, including the top Facebook exploits and some simple strategies to make your social media activities safer.

Not to beat a dead horse, but there are a lot of people out there who are very, very upset at the idea of sharing their social media logins with employers or potential employers. I'm not talking about the ACLU, and a couple of senators asking the Justice Department to look into the matter. I'm talking about real people worried about being asked to give up their personal information and privacy. The only way you're going to get their Facebook password is to pry it from their cold, dead hands.

At least that's the impression I got from the 24 comments on my earlier post (When Your Boss DOES Have the Right to Your Facebook Password) as well as dozens more culled from lively discussions on a number of LinkedIn groups.

It is hard to believe that Dell's IdeaStorm site is five years old. (It's Feb 2007 launch was covered by us here.) But harder still to realize was that until last week, the venerated ideation site was getting a bit long in the tooth, even though it has had close to 500 different ideas implemented by Dell on various projects and products. Some of the ideas resulted in Dell's first backlit keyboard, wider sales for Dells in electronics stores, rack-mounted blade workstations, and and for Dell to offer Linux pre-installed. This last item has been partially implemented.

Last week Dell did a complete makeover of the site, adding features, reworking the UI, and in general sprucing up the place. We spoke with Bill Johnston, Dell's Director of Global Online Communities, to see what is new and what were some of the lessons learned.

Some folks are getting riled up over employers asking job seekers for Facebook passwords, others think it might be OK. Me? I think there's a business opportunity being overlooked in catering to employers' concerns about social media.

Monitoring social media is already a business, but that applies to public posts.

Raise your hand if you want a Windows 8 tablet just so you can use that cool new Start screen. Wait, first put your iPad down. Now raise your hand.

After two public previews of Microsoft's new Windows 8 technology, the one major difference we've seen thus far in what it does, compared to its predecessors, comes from a few of its cloud-reliant apps, including Pictures. You can store your pictures on Microsoft's SkyDrive and have them automatically sync across your (Windows-branded) devices. That's very nice, but no longer new. Come October, it may even be old hat. ReadWriteWeb asked the Panel of Esteemed Grown-ups (who reminded me to say thank you for the esteem) to deduce what kinds of functionality might make you consider purchasing a Windows 8 device, whether or not you have an iPad. Joining us for this round are (left to right):

Ross Rubin, Executive Director and Principal Analyst, NPD Connected Intelligence
Al Hilwa, Program Director for Applications Development Software, IDC
Sarah Rotman Epps, Senior Analyst for Consumer Product Strategy, Forrester
Carmi Levy, Correspondent, Yahoo Finance Canada; Contributing Technology Analyst, CTV