Yesterday, a client asked for some information regarding best practices around gathering information for user profiles. Through some of the research I've been doing, I've seen that there are no hard & fast rules when it comes to user profiles. However, I put together some general recommendations that are applicable to all types of communities:

1. Define your strategy: When creating your profile questions, you should keep in mind the type of information you are looking to gather from this data. If you have a set goal for the site, make sure that the data you are capturing helps to reach that goal
2. Limit # of Profile Questions/Mandatory Fields: While you want to capture relevant information from your community members, you do not want to overwhelm them during the sign-up process. With our platform, you have the ability to go back and add profile questions, so you can have users sign up for your community and then later have them expand their profiles.
3. Privacy Settings: Allow users to have the ability to limit the information that is shared from their profiles with other community members.
4. Personalization: Give users the opportunity to give their profiles a personal touch by allowing them to upload photos or avatars.
5. When adding profile questions, such as polls, it is advisable that the content be around timely events. Most people are more likely to answer a question or their thoughts on issues that are currently taking place. An example of this may be asking users how they feel about recent gas prices.

I'm interested to know if anyone has looked into this question and if so, what your thoughts are.




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Through Google Alerts, I came across an interesting article by Christopher Lynn about companies who are trying to find the right balance between protecting private company information and allowing social media in the workplace.

In the article, Lynn discusses some tips by Joel Postman (principle at Socialized) for creating an effective internal social media policy:

• Develop a comprehensive policy that extends to all employees and all use of social media and social networks whenever there is potential for employees to be seen as company representatives.
• Engage with all appropriate departments within the company, such as legal, finance and marketing, when developing the policy, but do not allow their influence to result in an overly restrictive policy.
• Be emphatic about the need for social media users to behave ethically, legally, and in the best interests of the company, its customers, employees, shareholders, and business partners.

As social media becomes more prevalent in the workplace, it makes better sense for companies to proactively develop internal social media policies then to rely on blocking sites as the only means of control.

To read the full length article: http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2008/07/searching-for-balance-companie.html

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