Social Media is dominating many businesses marketing channels; it is becoming the defacto outlet channel. Corporate entities need to start implementing Social Media Polices, and educating employees about their Social Media strategy.
In 1997, IBM encouraged its employees to use the Internet. The opposite of many companies who were restricting their employees’ Internet access at the time. “In 2003, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing environment of relationship, learning and collaboration”.Source from IBM Social Computing Guidelines. IBM’s guideline controls employees’ behaviour online, and minimises any uncertainty there is to the employee. Today employees are your ambassadors to the online community, the more equipped and knowledgably they are the better they are prepared to participate and response to the online community.
Below is video about Social Media Policy, and what employees need to be trained on. It is simple information yet very often taken for granted. All our online actions have as either a positive or negative reaction. Everyone in your organisation has access to Social Media and hence no one should be excluded from the Social Media Policy training.
The online marketing and social media team should be internally championing the different platforms, and the benefits. By allowing the marketing division to talk employees about social media, employees can casually help out with the strategy. It is important to realise that everyone in the organisation can contribute to the social media strategy. Collaboration needs to start with your organisation first. Getting the buy-in within the corporate walls will only strengthen strategy. Here is a quote from the IBM website: “IBM believes in dialogue among IBMers and with our partners, clients, members of the many communities in which we participate and the general public. Such dialogue is inherent in our business model of innovation, and in our commitment to the development of open standards. We believe that IBMers can both derive and provide important benefits from exchanges of perspective”
Good Media Habits
Even consumers online need to practise “Good” Media habits. Peers recommending peers on LinkedIn for the wrong reasons and subscribing to too many blogs, twitter and RSS feeds can make it almost impossible to filter the valuable information. The likelihood of consumers becoming frustrated with the information overload is high. Acts like these can make the social media initiative less credible. Here is a link to “A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately”, by John Welsh.
From corporate users to consumers online, we all need guidelines, to ensure it is a win-win situation. Technology has enabled us to collaborate effortlessly, freely, and express ourselves. Transparency is one of the best attributes of the social media network. Exchange of ideas and the combined knowledge of expertise enable us to grow and develop as a society more than ever before. But is it possible that we could hinder this growth, and jeopardize this initiative, by taking Social media polices/guidelines and Good Media Habits for granted?
