Comments on: Employee Policies For Social Media Participation

By: sleeping disorders

sleeping disorders — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:44:02 +0000

pretty interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

By: Of ‘old skool’ businesses and new social horizons

Of ‘old skool’ businesses and new social horizons — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:50:06 +0000

[...] Falls of Social Media Explorer started an intriguing discussion on employee policies for participating in Social Media: “Does your company support your participation in social media? Are you apprehensive about [...]

By: Jason Falls

Jason Falls — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:09:17 +0000

Wayne — I sure hope so, but I think it requires a healthy balance of both while we’re still underlings (heh). 20 years from now, executives will even be web savvy and our world will be a different place. It’s exciting to think. What’s even more exciting is that we’ll be the folks who get us there.

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:14:03 +0000

Maybe it’s less about education and more about adoption & up-take being a generational thing?

Could just be that people like us here are the new thinkers who will replenish the managerial pool with a more network-centric outlook…

By: Jason Falls

Jason Falls — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:22:07 +0000

Jenn - Amen, sister. I hear ya and completely agree. Thanks for the offering and for stopping by.

By: Jenn Osborne

Jenn Osborne — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 19:37:38 +0000

Jason, great post! Companies that don’t learn to embrace social media are going to miss out.

Employees can be our best brand evangelists. If you do a search for any major company on Facebook you’ll find groups of employees who’ve already started their own groups because they feel an affiliation with each other.

Smart companies will find a way to encourage this behavior and channel it with reasonable guidelines. It’s the companies that stick their heads in the sand or try to outlaw social media all together that lose out on the discussion that’s already happening.

By: Jason Falls

Jason Falls — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:24:10 +0000

Chris — Great point and nice analogy. You’re right that the excitable ones are the people we’re talking to. The ones who don’t care to participate or identify themselves as working for the company aren’t going to be effected either way. Thanks for the perspective.

By: ckieff

ckieff — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 15:33:58 +0000

Jason,

Thank you for the excellent article. You’ve summed up the best guidelines in an excellent way.

One thing occurred to me while reading Wayne’s comment, “employees might be less revved about talking up”. This type of problem is self-correcting. If they don’t want to talk about work, and there are lots of people who don’t, then they simply won’t. The idea here is to say to people that if you decide to do this- here is how to stay out of trouble.

It’s no different than the company bowling league or softball team. It doesn’t matter if you are heckling the other team or clicking away on your computer. Be smart in what you do and think about how people will react to it.

Thanks,
Chris

By: Jason Falls

Jason Falls — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:13:39 +0000

Wayne — You’re absolutely right in a generic assessment of business today. But as that education process evolves, we as social media thinkers should be spending more time framing their experiences in defined ways (with rules, instructions, measurable outcomes) to foster understanding. It is frustrating to run into the roadblocks most CEOs, CMOs, brand managers or business owners will put up, and you’re right, there won’t be success pushing social media understanding and implementation in the majority of cases for a while, but if we don’t continue to patiently guide the process, it will be slower and more frustrating.

Thanks for the thoughts!

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:34:53 +0000

Before I begin, I just want to say that I totally agree with the advice, OK?

It’s very much in line with what I’ve been going on about for some time.

The thing is, a lot businesses have little or no concept of what their “brand” is, let alone how to manage it.

Plus, their employees might be less revved about talking up their employers and caring less about what brand they might or might not have.

So for a lot of businesses, this kind of advice — sound and sage as it is, and believe me, I’ve doled out the same advice myself — is like talking to the wind.

I’ve been in same situations myself with people I know — both as employers and employees.

I recently had a security specialist by the name of Paul Maloney write for my ‘blog about the issues inherent to things like Facebook, as an example.

These are genuine issues that people genuinely know very little about, and don’t really want to know anything about.

For the most part, they have their heads down, micro-managing their businesses and Facebook is for teenagers and never the twain shall meet.

So there’s a lot of edification on the in between…