At Gap Inc., Shareholder Value Still Trumps Worker Safety

Steve Denning
Contributor

St. Louis Doesn’t Suck

Aaron Perlut
Contributor

In the event you’re not paying attention to St. Louis media and missed the social media-driven saga of Larry Conners and CBS CBS affiliate KMOV-TV, let’s recap.

After the news broke about the IRS targeting Tea Party groups during the 2012 election, Conners, the longtime KMOV anchor, hopped on his Facebook Facebook page, created for him by KMOV, and wrote he had been targeted by the IRS after an interview with President Barack Obama in 2012.

On May 13, Conners wrote in Facebook: “I don’t accept ‘conspiracy theories,’ but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me. … Can I prove it? At this time, no. But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview … the IRS has been pressuring me.”

There was media attention, of course, and the next day he read a statement on KMOV’s 5 p.m. newscast back pedaling off his initial claim and admitting the IRS issues dated back to 2008.

“To be fair, I should disclose that my issues with the IRS preceded that interview (with Obama) by several years,” Conners said.

Conners was then taken off the air, at least temporarily. And then yesterday came the final shoe to drop.

“We regret to announce that Larry Conners is no longer a KMOV news reporter,” Mark Pimentel, KMOV TV President GM, wrote in a statement. “Larry was a valued member of KMOV for a long time, and we will miss him.”

After his dismissal, we also learned two other interesting nuggets of note from Conners:

• Conners claims he disagreed with the on-air statement, suggesting he was forced to read it.
• After his interview, Conners told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he had a payment plan with the IRS dating back to 2008, and after his interview with the President, the agreement was cancelled, with the IRS informing him they would now take action.

In reading through the lines of corporate statements filled with legalese as well as public posturing, here’s my take.

Conners is a news broadcaster — a trusted source for “unbiased” information. And while many organizations, news or otherwise, don’t have well thought out social media policies and procedures (and those that do, often don’t do an effective job of articulating the policies to employees), today most media outlets encourage their personalities to leverage social media and engage on a personal level with viewers to build a larger, more loyal audience.

In doing so, certainly Conners has a right to speak his mind. But as someone who’s expected to truthfully deliver news to thousands, he is held to a higher standard than most.  Yes, we enjoy free speech. But that doesn’t give us the right to yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. And particularly as a public figure and ambassador of a news organization, it’s incumbent upon Conners to be more cautious.

In the end there are many lessons to be learned on both sides: All forms of organizations need to have social media policies and procedures in place that are clearly articulated to employees. And as we all must do, employing a modicum of common sense and an understanding of one’s personal responsibility in social media channels is never a bad idea as long as we prefer gainful employment.

Why Tumblr’s Sale To Yahoo Is Worrisome For Native Advertising

Alex Kantrowitz
Contributor

Four Takeaways from Pew’s “Facebook Vacation” Report

Alex Kantrowitz
Contributor

It’s worth noting that the biggest social media story of the year so far has nothing to do with innovation but rather the sale of an existing platform, Tumblr, to an entrenched tech giant, Yahoo Yahoo. It may be a sign that the first big social media land grab has come to an end.

The idea that the social media industry is settling in is a strange one. For a while, it seemed like a new massive platform would pop up every few years and the pattern would keep going forever. From 2006 to 2011, Facebook Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram all hit growth spurts and solidified their status as giants within incredibly short time frames. But the phenomenon seems to have come to a halt. Recently, the most promising attempts to break into social have not been new concepts, like Pinterest was in 2010, but rather purported giant killers like Google Google Plus. And the giants are still in great shape.

The Sharing Ceiling 

While it’s hard to say what exactly is responsible for putting big social media into neutral, a likely culprit is that the industry has hit some sort of sharing ceiling. Humans will not share infinitely, we have a limit. Sharing a photo on Facebook is fun, but sharing the same photo on three additional networks starts to feel like work. Posting a single status can be rewarding, but posting ten in a day will likely annoy your friends and make you want to take a nap.

We love engaging in the social world, and can spend hours there, but we all eventually get sick posting, reblogging and imagining new concepts to push out. We won’t keep on sharing endlessly.

The Pie of Low Friction Sharing

Once we accept that there’s not an infinite willingness to share, it’s fair to say that there are a finite number of big social platforms that can thrive. Sharing is what fuels their existence. Without it, they would be empty structures.

Those at the top today have carved out a niche by becoming sharing depots for one low friction form of content or another. Instagram and Pinterest run on images, Twitter runs on short bursts of information, Facebook used to run on photos, but it moved towards information and then bought Instagram to keep itself balanced. Tumblr, for its part, is unique in that it is conducive to the sharing of images — photos, GIFs and memes — but is also used by a small core of users to write and share short and mid-length blog posts. It’s sort of the caulk of the social media world, filling in gaps left by the others.

All these platforms do what they do well and, as long as they mess it up, there will be diminishing returns to share content elsewhere. Google, for instance, thought it could create a better version of Facebook, and perhaps even did with Google Plus, but it was too late to the game for the vast majority of Facebook users to give it a shot. Google Plus’s average user now spends just under seven minutes a month on the platform, as compared to just under seven hours for Facebook. One we share something on Facebook, there’s little reason to share it on Plus as well.

What Happens Now

Here’s where things are likely to go from here: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram will stay at the top for the time being, but they won’t all be there in perpetuity. Even though it might feel like these platforms have been around forever, they are all less than a decade old and we’re still adjusting to them. The novelty will wear off eventually, opening up opportunities for new entrants.

Facebook, for example, is already seeing some cracks in its armor. Pew recently found that 61% percent of Facebook users take breaks lasting several weeks and, as the AP reported yesterday, more and more teens are migrating to Twitter. These are signs that opportunity does exist for social media newcomers, but the challenge for them will be to figure out how to capitalize on the inevitable fatigue with those at the top today.

Still, it will be a long and hard road for new entrants, especially given the fact that VCs are investing less in consumer technology. “Consumer behaviors are starting to ossify on the web,” wrote venture capitalist Fred Wilson in a blog post last year. “It is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start.”

That said, Yahoo’s deal for Tumblr is probably a good one. It was able to snatch up one of the three still-private social giants at a relatively low price tag. If Yahoo lives up to its promise not to screw Tumblr up, it will likely have a seat at an exclusive table for some time to come.

Follow Alex Kantrowitz on Twitter: Follow @Kantrowitz

More on Forbes:

Yahoo’s Top 10 Biggest Acquisitions

People desperate to find loved ones, pets and treasured belongings lost amid the rubble in this week’s massive Oklahoma tornado are turning to social media for help.

“Within 20 minutes of the tornado there were 15 Facebook pages that popped up with people posting missing and found pets,” says web developer and animal lover Emily Garman, 34, of Oklahoma City. “Online, that is where we turn for information now. When things happen it breaks on Twitter and Facebook first, so that’s where you go.”

With more Facebook groups popping up every hour, Garman created OKCLostPets.com hoping to consolidate the emotional search process for missing animals. “So far there have been 220 posts on the site,” she says. “Two or three are coming in a minute.”

More than 1,700 people have joined the group Moore Oklahoma Tornado Safe where people are posting information about missing family members. One photo album is titled “Photos of survivors, hope one is your lost loved one.”

A post on the Moore Oklahoma Lost and Found group, which has more than 8,400 likes, lists the names of 42 people who have been found and are safe. The list has been updated to reveal when the people are reunited with their families.

FULL COVERAGE: Tornadoes devastate Oklahoma

In other posts, family and friends beg for any information about the location of their loved one or the condition of the home that once stood at a particular address.

People’s instincts often turn to social media in times of recent trouble. Tools such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Reddit have aided in rescue, relief and reconnection efforts during Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Isaac and even the Boston Marathon bombings.

Along with the social media sites, the American Red Cross hosts a website called Safe and Well, where people can log on and enter information regarding their welfare so family and friends can check their status.

Papers, photos and family mementos were strewn all over Oklahoma state during the tornado. Organized by yet another Facebook group, May 19th 2013 OK Tornado Doc Picture Recovery, people are scanning and taking photos of things they find miles away and posting them to the group’s page which has more than 10,300 members.

The page is covered with images of muddy and torn photos of families hugging, friends laughing, weddings, birthdays and first days of school.

One Oklahoma resident posted a crinkled photo of a baby in a high-chair at a birthday party with the caption “This (photo) was in our yard.”

People quickly commented on the photo.

“This photo is of my sisters deceased husband when he was a child,” another user posted. “She and my 7 year old nephew lost their home … Bless you for posting this!”

“People love a stage or a pulpit from which they can broadcast,” S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, explained. “The genie is out of the bottle. Everyone loves it and it’s very seductive for users to get online and be a source of content, rather than just consuming passively.”

This is behind the appeal of sites like Tumblr, where millions have created signature blogs; or Reddit, the news aggregator, which is encouraging users to make and upload video content to share; or video sites like YouTube. Also, Vine, a Twitter app that allows people to easily make and post six-second videos has been wildly popular since its debut in January. One of Vine’s creators, Dom Hofmann, said its initial success was “rooted in the simplicity of the tool.”

Snapchat, the messaging application, which lets people add text or draw cartoons on top of photos and videos, is processing upward of 150 million images each day. And Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, has attracted more than 100 million users in its short life span — letting people add vintage effects and other filters to their photos.

The more services like Vine and Tumblr can “come up with ways to let people control and generate content and project identity,” Mr. Sundar predicted, the more successful they will be.

Still, these newer sites have not yet proved they are moneymakers, which makes Yahoo’s move a big bet. And as much as Tumblr’s sale can be seen as a success story for the small company, it also hints at the darker struggles of a social media service that is rich in users and nothing else.

Plus, Facebook is still a force to be reckoned with. The company has a billion-plus users and generated $5 billion in revenue last year. But except for the Instagram acquisition, Facebook has been slow to introduce tools to let members make and create interesting content beyond uploading photos and videos.

The result is that it has evolved more into a social directory, a kind of yellow pages of the Internet, where people spend time tending to their public image and endlessly tweaking security settings to keep their party pictures private. And signs have begun to emerge that users are becoming bored and disenchanted with the site.

A recent report by Piper Jaffray that surveyed 5,200 American teenagers on their online use found that while Facebook was still the most important media destination for teenagers, its popularity slipped by 9 percent from spring of 2012.

Gene Munster, one of the lead analysts on the survey, said that if anything, the results showed that the taste and interest of Web users, particularly younger ones, was fickle and fleeting.

“It’s not a question of whether or not Facebook will stay relevant,” Mr. Munster said. “On the margin, they will still be relevant. It’s about the potential for declining engagement and what that impact is over the longer-term for making money.”

People have so many news feeds, sites, apps and in-boxes competing for their time, said Kim Celestre, an analyst with Forrester Research, that the sites and services where they are active participants are more likely to hold their attention for longer, attracting advertising dollars. Tumblr says its members spend 24 billion minutes on the site each month.

“Big marketing campaigns are looking to bring people into their brand and immerse them,” she said.

Yes there are a series of options available, we can set your browser possibly to reject all cookies, to concede usually “trusted” sites to set them, or to usually accept them from a site we are now on.

However, greatfully note – if we block/delete all cookies, some facilities of a websites, such as remembering your login details, or a site branding for your internal journal might not duty as a result.

How J.C. Penney Can Stem The Tide Of Slumping Sales

Lydia Dishman
Contributor

Unlock the Selling Power of Your Place

Barbara T. Armstrong
Contributor

What We Can Learn From The Social Side Of Sports

Ken Makovsky
Contributor

When Jim Keenan, the social sales specialist, describes his work today, he’ll tell you that he’s “ushering salespeople from the old world into the social world” – the cold calling world to the Twitter world, the salespeople who call prospects incessantly to the salespeople who educate their prospects with relevant content. Keenan’s argument in the The Rise of Social Salespeople is that using social media to sell – increases profits.

But up until now, we’ve had no real data.  So sensing an opportunity, Keenan’s firm recently released a report on the impact of social media on quota attainment and the results were impressive.

The most interesting finding was that in 2012, 72.6% of sales people using social media to sell out performed those who weren’t using social media. He tells me he wasn’t expecting a number that high. Then, Keenan found that when it came to exceeding sales quota (exceeding quota by more than 10%), social media users were 23% more successful than their non-social media peers. Keenan told me that no matter how you sliced the data, social media users came out on top. (Note: You can download The Impact of Social Media on Sales Quota and Corporate Revenue here:)

I realize that many will argue that the numbers may mean more correlation than causation -and they have a point. But consider that over half of the respondents (54%) who used social media tracked their social media usage back to at least one closed deal. Over 40% said they’ve closed between two and five deals as a result of social media and more than 10% of the respondents said; “Yes, It directly contributes to my closes.” Respondents were very clear. Social media was a leading factor in their closed deals.

As you dig deeper into the data, it continued to support the premise, social media helps sales people make quota. Let’s take a look at Keenan’s data:

Social media users have also exceeded quota (exceeded quota by 10% of more) at higher rate than non-social media users every year since 2010. That means more social media users are at Presidents Club than non-social media users.

Not only do social media users achieve and exceed quota (win) more often than non-social media users, they also don’t miss quota (lose) as often. In 2012 non-social media users missed quota (by more than 10% or more) 15% more often than social media users.

With numbers like these and the success sales people are having using social media it begs the question, how much time are sales people spending on social sites and the answer from Keenan’s report is quite surprising. 50.1% of sales people who report using social media state that they spend less than 10% of their selling time using social media. That’s decent ROI.

Keenan says the top social selling sites were, in order, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Google+, other. He also tells me that almost 75% of the sales people surveyed said they have not received formal training from their company on how to use social media at all. I’m guessing that it’s primarily due to sales management and their lack of social sales understanding.

Keenan reminds me that social selling is not a panacea. But as he’s shown, those who have been using it are quickly gaining a competitive advantage. If Keenan’s data is statistically valid, then it’s clear. Social media can positively affect quota – which impacts revenue – which leads to better growth opportunities for business.

That also means that Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Plus, a blog, etc. are no longer nice to haves, they are salesperson must haves.

CHICAGO –  Seeking to keep pace with changing technology, Illinois toughened penalties Saturday for those who use social media and text messaging to organize violent “flash mobs” like those that have occurred on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and in other tourist areas.

Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation doubling the maximum prison term for offenders to six years. The legislation was in direct response to recent incidents in downtown Chicago that left business owners fearful that tourists and other visitors would be scared off. Bill sponsor Rep. Christian Mitchell, D-Chicago, has said it will also make neighborhoods throughout the state safer.

“Nobody should have to worry about a violent mob attack when going about their daily lives,” Quinn said in a written statement, calling the use of technology to organize such action a “troubling trend.”

Police say groups of young people used Facebook and Twitter, as well as text messaging, to organize and publicize a mob action along Michigan Avenue in March. They say several hundred people — most of them teenagers — ran up and down the upscale shopping area, yelling and bumping into people.

In a separate incident, police said a woman was attacked and her purse stolen after a group used social media to promote a flash mob on a downtown Chicago commuter rail line.

“In the city of Chicago, gangs have changed,” Mitchell said Saturday. “They are now using social networks to organize and mobilize violent activity. The intent of this legislation is to update our laws to reflect how people are using technology to organize crimes in our neighborhoods.”

Opponents of the bill worried innocent youths could get caught up in a flash mob and then be hit with a harsh penalty. They also said it would be difficult for authorities to prove.

The law takes effect immediately and revises earlier guidelines that allowed judges to sentence offenders to anywhere from one to three years in prison. That range now changes to three to six years.

The Power Of Social Capital

Lori Kozlowski
Contributor

CenturyLink​Voice:
Banks Looking To Cash In By Mining Social Data

Mindy Powers
@CenturyLink

For those who don’t know me, I am a huge fan of (in no specific order): coffee, breathing, peanut butter and puns. The latter of course is the reason for my purposely misspelled word in the title above.

Ok, maybe it’s not a pun in the biblical sense but I think it’s a pun nevertheless. If you don’t agree with me, that’s perfectly fine. And while I am not the world’s greatest speller – although I did come in 2nd place in the 6th grade spelling bee a few years back, the reason for my incorrect spelling of the word “mover” is due to the fact that I want to tell you about something called “muuver.”

As per their description on the crowdfunding site indiegogo.com, “muuver is a simple to use social app that let’s you share your hypes and gripes, kudos complaints, likes, and dislikes – about ANYTHING. muuver then takes your hype or gripe about an item and adds it to the ‘item page’ where you can see everybody else’s posts who hyped or griped about that item.”

Now I am a self-admitted social media junkie and anytime I hear of something new on the social media landscape I am usually drawn to it for at the very least to learn more about it.

Such was the case with muuver. When I heard about it then read about it on indiegogo.com, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more.

So I tracked down the president of muuver, Paul Marek to learn more. I asked him the obvious questions of what exactly muuver is, how it works, do we really need another social media network and so on. But I started off  querying him on why crowdfunding as a way to raise capital vs. the VC route – which other type startups seem to prefer.

SO: Why crowdfunding and not the traditional venture capital route?

PM: I  decided to go the crowdfunding route after attempting to put together a few pitch decks. Each ‘mentor’ I showed my pitch deck to told me it was wrong, and that I should do it their way. Then the next guy would tell me THAT way was wrong, and I should do it his way. It was a very disheartening experience – and I didn’t even get to the level of pitching to the big VC’s.  I went to a few VC meet greets but was disgusted at how I was treated. I spent hours putting together a package for them, then I actually saw one guy I pitched to throw my stuff in the garbage – right after telling me he’d take a look at it. That was enough for me.

Anyway, this is the power to the people tool, and I think turning to the people is the answer. I think the people should help build the tool, not have it in the hands of any one financial interest. In fact, we have a muuvment on the site called the “Use the tool to build the tool” muuvment. Essentially, since muuver is a tool for people to leave their opinion, we want to get their opinions about ALL the important aspects of muuver, from simple app functionalities, to helping us create our privacy policy.

This has to be built by the people, for the people, from the ground up. Therefore, in keeping with the theme of muuver, crowdfunding is the only road we can take.

SO: What is muuver?

PM: That’s a complex answer, but at it’s essence, muuver is a tool that is designed to give power back to the people. It’s designed to instantly connect and assemble people who share common ideas into groups, and uses the power of the collective voice of the group to create what we call a “muuvment”.

It’s complex because muuver is essentially a mashup of Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Klout and Wikipedia, which is a lot of functionality all rolled into one. But, we’ve actually made it extremely simple to use. In it’s simplest form, muuver is a place where you share your hypes, gripes, kudos, complaints, likes and dislikes… about anything. But then muuver automatically does a whole lot more from there.

Here’s an example of how it works:

Let’s say you want to post a gripe about CompanyXYZ. Posting a hype or a gripe is actually quite easy – you just use our ‘muuvtags’ instead of Twitter’s ‘hashtags’. To make a muuvtag, you put a PLUS sign in from of something you like, or a MINUS sign in front of something you dislike. If your item is more than one word, you just close the phrase with a plus or minus sign. So, to post your gripe you would post it like this “I had a really bad experience with -Company XYZ-.

The complexity grows from there, but muuver takes over and does the rest, meaning that it takes your post about the item you liked or disliked, and adds it to a page that only displays posts other users have made about that same item. So, your gripe about Company XYZ will get added to the “Company XYZ Item Page”, which displays everyone else’s post about Company XYZ. This is where the power is, because the item page not only shows everyone’s post about the item, it also shows a bunch of stats about the item like its overall +/- score, it lets you “watch” or follow the item, it displays the item’s popularity on muuver, shows total number of posts about the item, it’s total number of ‘voters’, and lots more that we’ll be revealing soon.

The +/- score is the most impactful stat though, because I think people don’t just want to see how many people “like” a company, service, or product – they want to see how many people DISLIKE it too. Seeing both is seeing the truth. But muuver does this with ANYTHING that people put into it, not just products or companies. The users create the items.

But it goes even further from there. Since everyone who has an opinion about Company XYZ is now all in one place, we can then put this focused group into action. From here users will have access to a set of tools called a “muuvement” that anyone can create and manage. Muuvments are exactly what it sounds like – a group of people focused on a particular cause or action. Our muuvment suite of online tools has everything you need to inspire and manage your group into action, including their own status feed, forums, event management systems and calendars, petitions, and a whole lot more.

SO: What do you say to people who say “oh great, another social media network?”

PM: This is the issue I’m most focused on. My entire effort is to ensure that muuver is not just “another social network”.

These tools are one resource that can be accessed by professionals to help streamline buying and selling efforts.

Indianapolis, Indiana (PRWEB) May 17, 2013

Social media use for commercial industries has grown in the past five years online. Apart from general communication, these websites are now useful tools for those working in the service industry. The HowtoMarketHouses.com company has published its social media tools for real estate investors list online. These tools are one resource that can be accessed by professionals to help streamline buying and selling efforts. These ways to simplify operating a social media presence can be accessed online at http://howtomarkethouses.com/3-tools-to-reduce-your-social-media-work.

The use of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin is helping some in the real estate industry to grow larger buyer and seller lists. While these tools are useful, the amount of time required to use each tool can be challenging. The manual process of logging into each site from a computer or smartphone more than once each day can takeaway the work day fast for professionals without an automated option. Part of the tools that are now listed online include ways to combine all posts, emails, tweets and other data from social media websites into one resource daily.

Creating lists of buyers is one method that some realtors and agents are using online to help boost the transactions completed each year. While offline connections remain popular in local areas, professionals with out of state buyers and sellers can have more opportunities to complete a sale. The tools listed on the HowtoMarketHouses.com website include ways that buyer lists can be created faster and without the traditional legwork required. The use of new tools and technologies is helping to streamline the efforts of some men and women currently working in real estate nationwide.

Aside from the tools lists now published online, a premium area is now provided to beginning and advanced real estate investors. This new area provides immediate access to more in-depth information, technologies and strategies that could be useful to an investor or seller of real estate. This new premium section of the company website can be accessed at http://howtomarkethouses.com/membership-offer. The textual content, online videos and e-book downloads are expected to help more people expand real estate portfolios.

About HowtoMarketHouses.com

The HowtoMarketHouses.com company launched its resource online to provide accurate tips and information to beginning and experienced real estate investors, brokers and other professionals in the housing industry. This company is owned and operated by Ryan Bush and the same strategies used by this expert are now offered to members of this online resource. The HowtoMarketHouses.com company website now features a free and premium content area to help provide multiple levels of educational resources to real estate professionals. The updated data that is offered by this company is helping more people become successful buying and selling properties in all parts of the United States.

PDF


Print

Effective spycraft has long called for cover—a job, family or routine that would keep a government agent from drawing undue attention. Now, that calculation extends to spies’ use of social media.

Facebook

and Twitter risks tipping too much to the other side. But given that social media use is becoming ubiquitous, revealing too little could also arouse suspicion.

“Technology is changing the spy business in so many different ways,” the ex-intelligence official said. “It’s very easy to find out a lot of information about people.”

The question of how much a spy should divulge online became a touch less theoretical this week after Russia unmasked what it said was an American spy—saying it had detained Ryan C. Fogle, a junior political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, amid what it alleged was an effort to recruit a Russian officer.

U.S. officials declined to say what agency employs the detained man. His family wouldn’t speak about the situation. The CIA declined to comment.

Regardless, the detention of the 29-year-old Mr. Fogle, a 2006 graduate of Colgate University, makes him one of the first members of the social-media generation whose online activities could be read against allegations that he spied.

Mr. Fogle’s Facebook page, as visible to his 243 “friends,” offered details about his social life, contacts and travel plans. One of those friends provided The Wall Street Journal with images of how Mr. Fogle’s page appeared to them.

On that page, Mr. Fogle said he worked at the State Department, posted photos of a tour of a Moscow Cold War bunker and of Mont Saint-Michel in France and Krakow, Poland. He bantered with apparent colleagues about flights back to the U.S. He also indicated he had plans to return to the U.S., including a date and flight route, and said that over Memorial Day weekend he planned to hang out at a restaurant in Arlington, Va., Ray’s the Steaks.

Mr. Fogle’s level of sharing appears restrained, by the standards of his generation. His 243 friends isn’t large for someone of his age group. The publicly accessible version of his Facebook profile doesn’t include a photo of him or personal information.

Personal information is, of course, the coin of the Facebook realm, and each user determines how little or much to divulge. The CIA, in setting standards for its own employees, appeared to draw its own lines.

The issue is particularly sensitive for young government employees who went to college when Facebook was already ubiquitous on campus. They are part of a generation that shares personal information more widely and rapidly than before.

The agency’s social-media guidelines, described by the former official, allow even undercover officers to maintain Facebook accounts under their real names. “The rules had to catch up with the technology,” the former official said.

But there are limits. While officers can’t post details of their work projects or travel, they may post personal notes on travel and photos, according to the ex-official. Officers were encouraged to use discretion to avoid compromising their agency status.

Facebook friendships between undercover officers and people openly working for the CIA were discouraged, according to the former official. Among other things, such connections could be used to identify undercover agents, through link analysis.

When the policy was issued, it led to a quandary for CIA officers, the ex-official said: Whether to defriend undercover officers. Doing so en masse could have had an unintended effect of alerting others to an undercover officer’s status.

Write to Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 17, 2013, on page A10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Social Media PoseNew Riddle for CIA.