Are You Twittering—Again—About How Awful I Am?

[Cartoon courtesy of Grantland Cartoons]

It used to be that the ladies room was the prime stage for the office's gossip grapevine. And, if not the ladies room, then the kitchen or the office parking lot. These days, the ladies room is everywhere, not in terms of public sanitation (hopefully), but in terms of stages for gossip. Thanks to social networking, the places where your employees can speak ill of you have multiplied. Did you see that picture Sally posted of you on Facebook from last year's holiday party?  Or the intoxicated photos Fred snapped for his MySpace page of your CEO from that last leadership retreat?

From unflattering pictures of executives to detrimental blog entries about the evil that this employee interprets your company to be, social networking is the prime tool of public relations these days, so you should come up with a strategy for managing, or at least coping, with its company-related use by employees.

First, is it OK for your workers to use social networking tools while on the job as long as it doesn't affect their productivity, or the quality of what they produce for your customers?  If you've shied away from allowing this, think again. For Generation Y'ers, tools like Facebook represent an important way to find new information and connect with other people, including those who may be beneficial to your company. As most of you hopefully know by now, it's common for people to have more than just "friends" as Facebook contacts. Most employees have received "friend requests" from business acquaintances, and even among those who are personal friends the employee socializes with, there could be new recruits for your company, fonts of knowledge of other industries, and potential facilitators of new business partnerships. If the price of gaining these benefits is an hour spent taking quizzes on what kind of dog the employee was in a past life, no big deal, right? 

The best part is in exchange for this open-minded, dare I say, hip, attitude towards their preferred medium of communication you may find a greater chance they'll use the platforms for the benefit rather than the detriment of your company. You've shown good will towards them, and are treating them with respect and trust, so why wouldn't they use Facebook to look up helpful business contacts, and see if their friend Mary knows anyone at IBM, rather than post pictures of you and your managers in a seemingly disoriented state. Granted, the ease with which young people use these new tools to the benefit of their work (in addition to their Friday night agenda) may, indeed, leave you feeling disoriented, but nobody has to know that.

For employees who breach your trust by telling tales of exaggerated woe about your company on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, what's the proper course of action to take?  Do you have a zero-tolerance policy about such behaviors?  If you do, it might not be the best strategy.  After all, once you've fired the publically complaining employee, won't he be free to complain even more about your company? A smarter course of action is to train someone in your public relations department to search the world of social networking not just for the sake of finding unflattering stories about your company, but to answer those those stories with their own take on it. The beauty of Web 2.0 is it's editable by all. Anyone's free to comment. By calmly answering the criticism with your company's perspective, you counter the argument about the evil oozing from your corporate veins. Whereas if you fire the person, you've proven his point and given him fodder for a thousand more public, and possibly viral, rants.

How about encouraging managers to tell employees they're free to incorporate optimization of social networks as part of their research and follow-through on projects?  This already is commonly done in the marketing and advertising worlds, but even for an engineer or corporate administrative assistant, social networking platforms can come in handy. We all have friends and friends of friends who know more than we do, and some of whom are placed in the exact place you need these employees to go to get the job done for you.

Also feel free to create opportunities for employees to use social networking to help you find new hires, and sustain those new hires past the first year. Think about which work groups in your company might find the creation of a Facebook page for your company, or some division of it, related to their work, and then give them that task as an assignment. You might be amazed at the information, contacts, and business leads they're able to find via their new social networking page. Also see if it would be possible to create a Facebook buddy system for new hires in which veteran employees (those who have been there—happily— for at least a few years) become Facebook friends with new hires, and use the tool to keep in touch and mentor the person so they don't become dispirited and leave you before you're ready. To take it one step further, create a Facebook page especially for your new hire mentoring program. It's an easy, enoyable way to facilitate communication between workplace friends. Sure beats your boring-as-broken-nails intranet portal.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,  the blogosphere, and the sundry other ways employees now have to make you look dumb and mean is staggering. But don't let that paralyze your executives into becoming technologically-backwards caracatures that—guess what?—are destined for their own reality series on YouTube.

What's happening on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube that doesn't reflect well on your company?  Can you do anything to stop it, and maybe even optimize the unplanned-for exposure?

Comments

[Paul Taylor]

Very refreshing to hear such a balanced non-knee-jerk approach. So many companies become aggressive with employee comments, adopting, as you say 'zero tolerance'. The employee comments are a symptom - the organization should be looking at the cause.

Whilst they do that, they can, as you suggest, put forward their own case. Now is the time for PR departments really to earn their salaries.