Number 18: September 3, 2003

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This week in Katydid:

• Plug that IM Security Leak
• How to Expand Your List
• Subscription Information

Plug that IM Security Leak
Two recent articles from Business Journal discuss some of the new issues raised by instant messaging (IM) services. The first article stresses the technical issues facing IT administrators who allow IM services to run on their sites. The second article discusses the legal and security issues related to IM traffic.

The main concerns are security and confidentiality. IM is an open channel. Companies have less control over IM than they do over their telephone service. Companies may restrict features such as long distance calling and they have an audit trail of calls placed from any phone. However, there are no restrictions on IM. Any employee with internet access may install the software on their computer and begin communicating without an audit trail.

Any tool is open to abuse; and if you can't trust your employees with their personal communications, you might want to address those trust issues on a grander scale. However, there are genuine risks. Such an open channel makes a prime target for viruses. Employees sensitive to e-mail safety may not be as careful with IM. Conversely, it's also easy for information to escape your business. In the same way you'd transfer a picture of your pet dog to a friend, you can transmit the latest code rev of your software to your competition.

The seeming anonymity of IM also leads to abuse. Most company policies state that e-mail is property of the company, and while everybody expects a certain level of privacy, most court cases have favored the company that pays for the infrastructure. E-mail threads are often called into evidence in corporate lawsuits, infamously so in the Microsoft antitrust case. Prosecutors have begun to subpoena IM conversations as well. Recent cases of insider trading and sexual harassment have relied on this kind of evidence. For this reason, lawyers have recommended that public companies restrict IM access and record all IM threads.

Perhaps a little personal restraint makes sense for both employees and the corporations for which they work. If security is part of the value of your company, it might make sense to have careful control over communications. For most businesses, however, there are too many low-tech ways for information to get past your walls to be overly concerned about IM security. Trash cans, envelopes, and the ever-trusty, but often overlooked, face-to-face conversation are still the primary leaks.

Corporations need to include IM policies in their employee handbooks, and consider installing IM auditing software. Employees, for their part, can exercise the same vigilance with IM conversation as they do with spoken conversations. Even if Big Brother is not watching, imagine your mother is.

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How to Expand Your List
A quick case study from ClickZ shows how The Sales Board, a training company, used an integrated marketing campaign to build their in-house list. I often recommend just such a strategy, so it's good to see confirmation from other sources.

One overlooked idea for an integration campaign is the business card. Because business cards are standardized, printing is often inexpensive and, of course, highly personalized. If a card can have an individual phone number or e-mail address, why can't it have a unique URL? Consider creating a landing page for your sales reps, or your service reps that caters to their respective audiences.

For example, if support is one of your major value points, you can include a special URL on the business cards of your training team. The landing page could include training material or other resources, as well as offers for solution upgrades.

For trade shows, it might be worthwhile and cost-effective to print business cards for your representatives to hand out that include unique offers for trade show participants. Because people hand out business cards face-to-face, they can be a critical control factor on reach. Additionally, you can track response through the unique URLs. While brochures often end up in the trash bins at the airport as people lighten up for the trip, business cards usually find themselves tucked in somewhere, a little information time bomb waiting to go off.

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Thanks for Reading
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Kind regards, 
Kevin Troy Darling

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