Dec 28, 2011
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Archive for the ‘social media policy’ Category
With all the talk about the complaint PhoneDog.com filed against Noah Kravitz for “misappropriation of trade secrets and damaged the company’s business, goodwill, and reputation” some companies are liable to update their social media policy.
But those that do are making a mistake. Because if they’re going to be heard through social media, they’re going to need as much help as they can get. And they’re not going to get it by imposing ownership claims over their personal social media accounts
I don’t intend to make any substantial changes to my Social Media Policy Template because of it, and here’s why:
On social networks, crowds direct our attention. If it trends, it upends. And if it doesn’t, it just ends.
What one person tweets matters only a little. What the crowd retweets, matters most. The same social gravity applies on Facebook, Linkedin and G+. An effective corporate social media policy protects the organization and its employees alike. Afterall, why would your employees retweet your message on their personal social networking account if they’re concerned it might get them fired, or if they’re concerned you might someday try and take it away from them?
Imposing strict ownership requirements over an employee’s personal social media account discourages them from using social media for on theior employers behlaf, which means they won’t be retweeting your message. And in nowadays, you need retweets, Likes and +1s to get noticed. So a good social media policy must encourage employee participation.
Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, who is paraphrased in a story about the incident by New York Times reporter John Biggs (@JohnBiggs) says it best:
…many industries had policies that required sales staff to leave their Rolodexes behind, but that these policies were as relevant to social media as Rolodexes are to the modern office. After all, social media accounts are, almost by definition, personal.
He also said that the average Twitter account had less clout than many might think.
On social networks, we crowd source news and information. If companies want to get noticed, they’ve got to get crowds talking. And in most cases, their employees are going to be easiest place to start.
Do you intend to update your social media policy as a result of this complaint, or will you wait to see what legal precedent, if any, transpires?
Image By: Dbarefoot
Categories: social media policy, social networks0 CommentsMay 31, 2011Are you ready to win the war against digital illiteracy?
The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.
Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.
Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives. Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:
- Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
- Attract and retain top-notch personnel
- Thwart obsolescence
Here’s why:
On social networks, trends direct our attention. We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.
For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved. The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.
A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community. And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.
Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely. If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary. But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.
Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives. If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable. Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.
It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just. Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards. In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.
Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective. But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.
Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.
Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.
In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage. The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.
Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless. Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.
Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.
In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.
Apr 12, 2011If your social media policy restricts employees from criticizing your company on social media, you definitely need to read this. And you need to read it carefully. Because it could save you a lot of money, and a lot of aggravation.
According to a story by Steve Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) of the New York Times, the National Labor Relations Board threatened to sue Reuters last week for reprimanding an employee for using her Twitter account to publicly criticize the company.The employee, Deborah Zabarenko (@dzabarenko), who is also the head of the Newspaper Guild at Reuters, posted the following tweet as an @reply to a Reuters corporate Twitter account:
“One way to make this the best place to work is to deal honestly with Guild members.”
She was reprimanded for the tweet by her direct supervisor, who said her public critic could damage Reuters reputation. But according to the National Labor Relations Board, which tipped off Greenhouse through an anonymous source, employees have a legal right to engage in public dialogue, however critical it may be, to improve their working conditions.
A Reuters spokesperson replied by saying that the company has a social media policy, but I couldn’t find anything that applies to how employees can use social for internal communications. Erin Kurtz (@eekurtz), Reuters Head of Publicity has not yet responded to my email asking for clarification, but if she does, I’ll definitely update this post.
No compliant has yet been filed, and according to Greenhouse, the National Labor Relations Board has been known to threaten legal action as a way of forcing out-of-court settlements. The National Labor Relations Board is a U.S. Government Agency.
The issue of whether or not employees can publicly criticize their employers via social media has never been tested in U.S. Federal Court. Greenhouse notes that in November 2010, a Connecticut ambulance company settled out of court with the NLRB for firing a worker who posted a Facebook status update critical of her supervisor.
And while the amount of that settlement was undisclosed, the two incidents may warrant revisiting your company’s social media policy to see of you’ve got any language in there that could be seen as restricting your employee’s rights to free speech.
In my Social Media Policy Template, in my section of confidentiality, I have an item that reads:
External social media channels should not be used for internal business communications among fellow employees. It is fine for employees to disagree, but please don’t use your external blog or other online social media channels to air your differences publicly.
But given the risks that potentially restricting free speech may pose, you might consider asking your legal counsel about adding the following language:
Worker’s have the right to engage in conversations with co-workers to improve working conditions.
With the use of social networks in business becoming more pervasive, it’s going to get tougher for companies not just to avoid developing an official social media policy, but also to ensure those policies are constitutional.
As social media becomes a common channel of communications, corporations with policies need to make sure their legal staff has the social media literacy to keep them up to date.
We will be discussing this matter in depth in the next episode of the B2B Social Media podcast with Chris Boudreaux who specializes in corporate social media policy development.
What’s your view on this development? Will you update your social media policy as a result? And if so, how?
Social media advocacy by groups like the AARP shaped the debate over national healthcare reform last year, and will hold tremendous sway over the outcomes of the current budget stalemate, the 2012 presidential election and next year’s budget debate (Republicans have already proposed $4 trillion in cuts in the 2012 federal budget).
Web 2.0 advocacy is now a decisive lever in national policy debates, and has been put to good use recently by organizations not immediately associated with blogs, Facebook and Twitter, according to communications leaders at nationwide advocacy groups.
Social media activism helps organizations of every political stripe to efficiently mobilize members around policy debates, and the power of such tactics has been skyrocketing alongside social media adoption. The value of new media advocacy lies it is ability to drive engagement as part of a call to action.
With budget matters so hotly debated that the federal government is approaching a shutdown, communications pros for organizations on both sides of the debate need to make the very most of two-way social media conversations to win the day. If you were tasked with finding, and inspiring, constituents in a group to call Congressmen, vote for a candidate or join a protest, how would you use social media to get your people moving? Read the rest of this entry »
Categories: social media policy, socialmedia
Nov 15, 2010
With the social media policy prohibiting command from blocking access to social media indefinitely on their nonclassified network, the US Department of Defense made a public decision to embrace social media, the origins of which I profiled on my blog earlier this year. This podcast is about the shift from command and control to a network hierarchy inside the US Military.“We’re in the churning point, [and we’re moving] from hierarchical to networked structure,” says Jack Holt, director of emerging media at the US Dept. of Defense, who I sat down with at the PRSA International Conference in DC last month for this podcast. According to Jack, when it comes to social media, DoD is moving from command and control to a more distributed, network hierarchy, a move that depends heavily on teaching service members not so much about social media tools, but rather the path to peace in a networked world.
Beyond public relations and public affairs applications of social media, the larger opportunity social media networked information technology presents is the ability to better manage knowledge inside to organization, and better preserve organizational intelligence in an organization where service members frequently transition in and out of different operations and commands.
Other topics discussed include: The Blogger Roundtable at DoD Live, social media training, Al Qaeda’s online effectiveness, use of video at the Gaza Flotilla Raid and speed versus accuracy. Follow Jack Holt on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jack_holt.
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@EricSchwartzman provides online communication training, strategy and social media governance to public relations, public affairs, corporate communications and marketing specialists. He has extensive experience integrating emerging information technologies into organizational communications programs through public speaking, hands-on training seminars, consulting and the development of corporate policies on social media usage.
His clients have included Boeing, BYU, City National Bank, Environmental Defense Fund, Government of Singapore, Johnson & Johnson, NORAD Northcomm, Southern California Edison, UCLA, US Dept. of State, United States Army, US Embassy of Athens, the United States Marine Corps and many small to medium-sized companies and agencies.
Eric is the instructor behind PRSA’s top-rated social media training seminars, the Social Media Boot Camp and the Social Media Master Class, which are offered monthly in the US.
His book “Social Marketing to the Business Customer” with Paul Gillin about B2B applications of social media communications is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.