Managing Employees’ Professional and Personal Social Media Usage

It's all about setting encouraging and sensible policies and expectations.

By Ava Seave
01/21/2010 -11:32 AM

At almost all media companies and their advertisers, employees are using social media for marketing and customer relations. Frequently, the expertise that these folks have gained have come from personal usage—lots of time right from the very desks where they work. What to do?

“You need a social media policy that sets the foundation of your expectations, empowers your employees to tweet or blog without fear, rewards social media problem-solving, and educates staff on things to avoid in both personal and professional status updates, “ writes Jennifer Van Grove, associate editor at Mashable.

Easy enough to say, but complicated to get right for many, including myself. So to tackle the real nitty gritty issues, I’ve been talking to a pal to work things through. We’ve organized an upcoming February 4 talk on the subject at a non-profit management group to enlarge the discussion. Gavin McGarry of Jumpwire Media is bringing the issue down to the very, very basic question: “Why Facebook Should NOT Be Banned from Your Company?”

Social Media consultant Alexandra Samuel urges corporations to be clear that they share the “risk management responsibility” of contributing to social media. If your guidelines are too restrictive or confusing, employees will figure that the safest course of action is to do nothing.

Putting a policy in place should take place simultaneously with figuring out how to integrate the intelligence you gather from Social Media tools into the management of your products. Samuel warns of the very real challenge of “integrating a grassroots medium into an even moderately hierarchical organization.”

A recent Harvard Business Review article states that it is not an option, but a necessity for a company to have a social media policy to properly manage customer relations. Appropriate standards and guidelines must cover accountability, accuracy, transparency and lawfulness. After all, the article makes clear, the business reason to engage online communities is that you want consumers to talk TO your, not just ABOUT your company.

Ava Seave is a Principal of Quantum Media, a strategy and marketing consulting group.