Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media
Social media has ignited a revolution in how companies interact with their customers and business partners by offering a more interactive and personal way in which to build relationship and engage in online conversations that define a company’s presence on the internet. Yet social media also affects businesses in other ways, and companies have to keep a close eye on how their employees use social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Employees are people with lives outside the company, and like a rapidly growing number of people they use social media sites to organise their lives, express themselves and communicate in the highly public arena of the internet. As their jobs are a big part of their lives, their comments may well reflect on their place of work, their company’s products and services, or even their employer’s clients. Of course, if their comments are positive then there is no problem, but any negative comments can go viral and create a PR disaster.
That is why HR departments are increasingly concerned their companies’ policies on social media. A short message on Twitter can soon spiral out of control if it is picked up by other followers and reposted, and there are many examples of this simple act forcing companies into lengthy and costly damage control exercises.
What seems private and personal to an employee can soon become very public through social media, leaving HR teams to pick up the pieces. The solution is the have an internal social media policy that makes it clear to employees what behaviour is tolerable, and what is not. Relying on common sense is not enough. So, a social media policy needs to clearly define the ethical issues arising from discussing a company online, whether it is on a blog, on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other online forum.
It should address employees’ use of social media not only when they are at work, but also outside working hours, but without being so prohibitive that employees resent it. It should also have clear guidelines on how any policy will be monitored and enforced. Furthermore, it should stress that people will be held responsible for any comments they post that are explicitly identified with an employee of the company.
In short, HR bears the burden of setting a policy that clearly shows employees what rights and responsibilities they have as representatives of the company in the online space, and what the consequences are of posting comments about their employer.
0 Trackbacks to HR has to pick up the pieces of internal social media policies