I am curious as to if companies have formal social media policies. During my last few speaking engagements I was surprised about how few do and/or it is not known to exist by employees?
If you have one, how do you communicate and enforce it?
Does your Company have a Social Media Policy?
Answers
Yes
Yes, we have a policy. We have had to enforce it once when an employee violated the client confidentiality policy using SM. We issued a written warning and required the employee to remove the post from Facebook. We then re-visited the SM policy at the next quarterly staff meeting.
This recent report (http://nexgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/nexgate-state-of-social-part-3.pdf) discusses social media compliance and recommendations for developing a social media compliance program. And here is a Social Media Policy Template: http://ericschwartzman.com/resources/social-media-policy
At the previous company, a few years ago, I managed a large group and we did not permit access to Social Media during normal working hours. We changed that when an employee who who was responsible for billing his time told me he was leaving at 5:00 to go home to check Facebook because his friends were deciding where to go that night at 5:30 and he had to have access. They weren't meeting until 8:00 and he said he would have stayed and billed time until 7:30 if he was able to just check his Facebook page.
One social media policy (sort of an all encompassing one) that I encourage is ...."Do not put the company's name. ideals, reputation, core values at
The other side of the coin is that employee use of social media can also be used by the company to it's advantage. It reflects (or can) to a certain degree, employee satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), engagement and can be used by the company as data/feedback points. I see a lot of my social media friends sing high praises for the companies they work for and more often than not promote projects (and even vacancies) in their social media page.
We have some policies which are similar to the ones that Emerson has suggested and these are communicated via internal
I keep one social media outlet for personal use with no mention of my work in my posts and all others are dedicated for work related purposes. Professional networking over social media can be beneficial in getting to know colleagues in your field of business, new prospects, etc.
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