Pondering whether your company should be using social media?
You already are, you just don’t know it yet.
Throughout your organization people are on Facebook, Twitter or they’re blogging about the company on their own sites. Your sales force is on café pharma anonymously posting comments about your upcoming marketing strategy.
Some of this is harmless. Some of it is brilliant, like the sales rep in Connecticut who is making videos of himself explaining your product and posting them on YouTube so potential customers can find him online. He’s driving revenue with it.
Another portion of users in your organization represent a serious breach of security and are giving a smart competitor an advantage.
Companies are coming to terms with this in unique ways, and it doesn’t always mean clamping down.
Online shoe retailer Zappos.com Inc., of Henderson, Nevada, has more than 450 employees using Twitter to communicate with one another on topics ranging from politics to marketing plans. They have begun offering classes to teach basics like how to follow a friend’s updates to advanced topics like using third-party services.
GE has a Tweet Squad that helps employees get up to speed with using social media.
What to do.
A social media policy is the right place to start.
IBM for instance has developed an evolving social media policy that gives employees best practices on the assumption you’re not going to be able to stop them from using social media anyway.
You will recall in a previous post we mentioned your legal department losing their cool when you started a company Twitter.
The process of setting up the social media policy can help avoid this blowup. Include your legal counsel and regulatory officers. Together you can establish a framework for the company to proactively use these tools in a way that isn’t overburdened by a stiff approval process that erases many of the virtues of social media’s spontaneity, speed and responsiveness to the market. But on the other hand you should end up with a structure that allows you to avoid doing stupid things online.
A well crafted policy not only tells employees what they shouldn’t be doing online, but can also frame up best practices and can serve as a roadmap for harnessing some of the good ideas already being used by the rank and file.
We recommend all our clients have a policy, and most do or are working with us on developing one.
There are three scenarios a comprehensive social computing policy needs to address.
The first is when employees maintain personal blogs, tweet, or post information about themselves on Wikis, message boards, e-mail groups, Facebook or other social forums online and may occasionally reference information relevant to their work at the company.
The second is when employees who maintain personal blogs, tweet, etc., specifically to profess their professional interests and therefore feature their work at the company prominently.
The third is employees who maintain official corporate blogs, or maintain personal/professional blogs described in scenario two, that are actively encouraged by the company and for which the company makes publishing resources available.
If you account for all of these and are clear with your organization about the benefits of helping the company tell its story online, and are transparent about the penalties for missteps, you can achieve some amazing results.