Social media policy effect on culture
Dec 08, 2009
A while back I was asked to participate at the Sask Communications Expo as a panelist on social media. The room was primarily filled with government agency communication departments. Throughout the session a few questions came up on how companies should approach writing social media policies for their employees. It brought back memories from a recent meeting we had with a large crown corporation. An employee voiced his frustrations with internal policies because he couldn’t actively help customers who were complaining online about the company. To date, this crown corp did not have any dedicated social media monitoring or service staff to handle complaints posted online. So the employee was told not to worry about it. I can understand the frustration on both sides.
Then I recently came across a short but great blog post from Chas Grundy that discusses how this can effect your culture. “If people want to do something great but don’t have the tools, support, processes, or resources, that’s an infrastructure problem. If people don’t want to do anything great, or change at all for that matter, that’s a culture problem.” This employee had what normal organizations wished upon all their staff: pride – which is a side effect of culture. He wanted to do great, but couldn’t.
How should something like this be handled? I don’t have a definite answer, but for starters I think everyone can agree that it’s wrong. I can understand enforcing policy to reduce corporate misbehaviour or abuse, but cases like this should be reviewed separately as it effects culture and client satisfaction. Don’t expect to get it right the first time. Social media and its uses are always changing, so expect your policy to adapt while you actively monitor the costs and benefits of social media in your organization.
After the session, one manager from an unnamed government department came up and admitted that he just “does it” and deals with the wrath of breaching policy (or the non-existence of policy) later. I like his style.
Jeph Maystruck
Dec 08, 2009 11:59
Great post, I agree! Wasn’t it just a month or two ago when a Google executive told reporters that Canada was lagging in the Social Media transformation? I think some of our larger companies (and definitely our crowns) are losing out not utilizing their media socially. How many times have we all been on the phone on hold with Sasktel? It’d be much easier if we could just send them a tweet and let them look into it instead of wasting time on hold.
Policy is for the 1990’s, those who ignore social media and call it a fad will lose.
David Mosher
Dec 08, 2009 15:23
Some good thoughts, Albert. At VendAsta we recently had a similar discussion due to the fact that we now include employee tweets on our corporate web page. The “policy” discussion about how best to implement this went around a number of people in the office and the general consensus was that we did not want to impose a significant overhead into the way people tweet if they wanted to be included on vendasta.com
Ultimately we chose to use an official twitter list housing the employees at VendAsta and left it up to the discretion of the individual whether they wanted to be included in the list at all. (Note: we did have some request not to be included given the nature of their tweets). I think it would have been ok to leave it at this but there was an additional layer of “process” imposed in that we implement a filtering mechanism so that tweets with profanity don’t appear on the website. While I’m not a proponent of censorship in any way I do agree that profanity could deter potential clients.
I think in general more companies _do_ need to embrace social media, and the best way to implement this certainly does raise some interesting questions about the best way to do that 
Albert
Dec 08, 2009 23:46
I hear you loud and clear on that. At zu, we’re experiencing the same thing and are always striving for balance. We’ve assigned certain people to be our voice, and have recently included any mention of zutweets to appear on our blog site. If companies like us, who champion social media, are still laden with that extra layer of “process”, I can only imagine what it’s like for larger and more constricted organizations.
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