Social Media Minute: Users Look to Keep Facebook Safe, Executives Embrace Social Media

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Executives Embrace (and Fear) Social Media
• AIM Adds Lifestreaming Capabilities
• ReadTwit Enables You to See Links From Twitter in an RSS Feed
• A Guide To Keeping Your Facebook Safe

Executives Embrace (and Fear) Social Media

A new study by eMarketer, a research firm, shows executives are starting to embrace social media as a way to get spread the word about their company's brand, recruit new talent and engage in customer service. Also, execs see social media as an avenue to build company morale internally.

82% of respondents of the survey say they're using social media to build brand and roughly 60% are utilizing the new medium for networking purposes.

However, while more and more at the top ranks within companies are embracing social media, they are also fearful of the technology at the same time.

More than half of the executives participating in the survey say they have fears regarding its use. Their concern includes a fear of information security leaks and a hampering of employee productivity.

AIM Adds Lifestreaming Capabilities

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is like a dinosaur in terms of Internet utilities. The IM program has been around forever and has quite a following. While innovation in the instant messaging market has stagnated in recent years, AOL just added some new functionality to enhance the AIM service.

Now, AIM users can check and update their status on other social networking services, namely Twitter and Facebook. So now using AIM, a person can stay up to date with their social networks within one application, similar to Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck, but with the added functionality of instant messaging built in.

This type of functionality is being embraced, as existing companies in the Internet technologies are looking to add new social features to their products.

ReadTwit Enables You To See Links From Twitter in an RSS Feed

On Twitter, the service is all about keeping you in touch with those who you trust and enjoy listening too. Often times, when someone finds a link they wish to share, they post it onto Twitter for their friends and colleagues to look at. So, links on Twitter are held in high regard for many users because they are suggested by friends.

Enter ReadTwit, a service that harvests the links out of your Twitter stream and wraps them in RSS, so that you can have an RSS feed of all the links mentioned by your Twitter followers. Having them in RSS will make it possible for you to read them on your schedule whenever it's convenient for you.

ReadTwit is a very useful twist on how one can gain further value from the real-time web. As many of us know, Twitter is great if you're on it constantly, but sometimes good content gets lost in the fire hose of information that Twitter sends us.

A Guide To Keeping Your Facebook Safe

Recently, President Obama told schoolchildren to be careful with what information they share and broadcast on Facebook. This is a timely topic as many recruiters are scanning social networking sites when making hiring decisions.

As readers of CMSWire already know, any content you put on the web can likely be found in the future, even if you delete it.

With this in mind, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb recently posted a 5-step guide to keeping your information safe and in front of the right eyes on Facebook. In fact, Facebook provides many tools and settings for controlling who sees your status updates and images on the service.

The most basic advice is to make friends list and let you customize what messages are sent to whom. For example, you may not want your boss seeing your weekend party pictures, but you want so share them with friends. Friends lists enable you to share assets with one group and hide them from the other.

Do you have concerns of information sharing on Facebook or other social networking sites? What controls do you use to share, without sharing too much?

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Tags: aim, facebook, readtwit, social meda, social media minute, twitter

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Executives Embrace (and Fear) Social Media
• AIM Adds Lifestreaming Capabilities
• ReadTwit Enables You to See Links From Twitter in an RSS Feed
• A Guide To Keeping Your Facebook Safe