Comments on: Social media policy effect on culture

By: Albert

Albert — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:46:13 +0000

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.

By: David Mosher

David Mosher — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:23:18 +0000

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

By: Jeph Maystruck

Jeph Maystruck — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:59:49 +0000

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.