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November 2, 2009

Social Media in the Workforce: Tweet, Tweet, Tweet, Tweedly-Deet

By Kennedy Maize

Do your employees tweet? Do they blog? Do they post to Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube? Do you even understand these questions?

Does your organization have a policy regarding social networking and your business? Do you have a policy regarding social communications on the job, or off the job, or both?

With the rise of the latest social networking technology—Twitter and Facebook—added to the earlier fad of blogging, companies are faced with new communications challenges. What are the rules of the business road for employees using these high-tech approaches to low-tech interactions—including spreading rumors, gossip, and gripes about the company?
 
Conversely, how can an organization mobilize these powerful tools to advance its products, messages, and goals? For example, does your firm use social media to recruit and vet employees or market your products? Do you Google job applicants, and how do you use that information? Do you monitor blogs about your company and your business and, again, how do you use that data?

Questions Without Clear Answers Still Demand a Response

Today, these are questions without uniform answers. But they are drawing increased attention as firms face the reality that employees have new, remote ways of communicating with friends and colleagues and customers and prospects, beyond the 20th-century technologies of meetings, telephone, letter, and email. Many firms have just recently faced up to the notion of the Internet and have been clobbered by the new means of communication. One wishes that Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) were still alive to contemplate the brave new world of social media.

Advertising Age columnist B.L. Ochman recently wrote that “many corporations are still scared of social media.” She noted that some large companies block employee access to the Internet, personal email, and other social media, on the grounds that these cost the organization employee productivity. She counters, “The value to workers of having Internet access—in terms of research, communication and speed—is far greater than the threat of lost productivity.”