Social Media 101

The world of social media carries with it the hope of great rewards for small businesses in helping to better market the organization and greater connect with your customer base.  There are pitfalls as well, however, and this post will briefly touch on a couple of topics that companies would do well to create policies to address.  I won’t argue for any particular direction – that is something that should be addressed on an organization-to-organization level.

(Image by Mentionablehonor (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.)

Social Media Use By Employees

Nielsen estimates that around 74 billion minutes, approximately 20 percent of their time, were spent on social media sites in 2012 – and that figure is for America alone.  Obviously some of that time was spent on office computers, using office bandwidth, in theory sapping productivity of office hours.  One estimate says that the various social media distractions are a ding against the US economy to the tune of $650 billion dollars!  So what is the answer?  Should it be blocked entirely?  IT departments around the globe have spent countless dollars and man-hours trying to stay one step ahead of people trying to do things they shouldn’t be doing at work, social media included.  Now, of course, everyone is walking around with a smartphone in their pocket – how to control that?  Does access to personal devices need to be controlled during working hours as well?

Social media distractions ding the economy $650,000,000,000

A good article by Jack Wallen talks about 10 reasons NOT to block social networking at the office.  These reasons run the gamut from protecting your company’s reputation to skill building amongst your workers to helping increase the transparency of your business online. I t’s certainly worth the read and provides a good counterpoint to “it’s costing me money!”

Risks to Organizations Using Social Media

The 2013 Social Media Risks and Rewards report shows that 71 percent of executives surveyed were worried about the potential risks of using social media while 13 percent were very worried (only 36% reported that they provided any employee training!).  Their concerns are well-founded as there are numerous places for an organization to trip up.  The Enterprise Risk Management Initiative put out a solid piece on this subject, in which the various items are grouped into three main categories: risk to reputation, legal/employment risks and information security risks.

• Reputation risks from the public, such as comments, conversations and feedback that can hurt the overall brand
• Reputation risks from employees who could say or leak something they are not authorized
• The organization itself should manage its overall social media presence to ensure that there are no social media blunders, thereby damaging its own reputation
• Legally, the organization should make sure that social media is not used for candidate screening, and needs to act carefully when using information found on social networking sites to factor in to termination decisions
• On an information security side of things the organization needs to be diligent against the leaking of information by employees, vendors or partners; social engineering attacks that could be used to breach company networks and perhaps inject viruses or other malware

To mitigate these risks companies need to make sure they have everyone at the table.  Social media is not just IT, not just marketing.  Its direction needs to start in the C-suite and should include everyone at the organization who may be impacted.  Goals should be set with input from everyone and a thorough risk assessment should be performed not just at the start of the project, but on a regular basis afterwards.  Policies should be put in place to define what is acceptable to be put on social media, and who is authorized to represent the company in any official channels.  Finally, the company needs to be diligent in monitoring the social media environment to make sure any issues that arise are dealt with in an appropriate manner.

Policies should define what is acceptable to be put on social media

With the proper forethought and the appropriate policies in place, social media can be a powerful tool for the enhancement of the organization. It should not be done halfheartedly though, as any missteps can prove to be a very public issue that can grow out of control very quickly.

(All accolades and credit for this tremendous blog post are for Robert Pazdan who is the author and creator of this post.)