Back during the 90's when Bill Clinton was president, in one of the commencement speeches he gave, he told the graduating class the following: "some of you will have jobs we haven't imagined yet." Truer words have never been spoken because at this point IF Google was around, it was in its nascent stages & Mark Zuckerberg was just another kid who hoped to go to Harvard some day. The internet was still young & new so no one was talking about web 2.0 yet. It wasn't until 2004 that a new layer of the web known as the blogosphere started to flex its muscle trying to get Howard Dean nominated [instead of John Kerry] to run against George W. Bush. While Dean's troops were not successful, a whole new medium was born in earnest with sites like Facebook &Twitter on its heels with much more to follow. Now even if you are not digitally fluent, you know there is important information to be acquired through this new medium. It's an easy way to keep up with family & friends or to interact with business in a whole new way.
Social Media: Now An International Force To Be Reckoned With
Even stodgy politicians across the globe have come to recognize that sites like Facebook & Twitter are forces to be reckoned with; the uprising in Cairo is just the latest example. Now that everyone is literally "twiddling their thumbs" on their mobile phones, it's increasingly more important to have a social media policy in your employee handbook. In fact sometimes fiction & reality go hand in hand so just to prove a point, one of the central themes in a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy was whether or not "tweeting" about the surgery underway should be permitted in the operating room. The chief of staff's concern of course was liability n the event that surgery was not a success.
What Topics Might Be Covered In This Policy
I have been thinking about this topic for a while now but I have to give credit where credit is due to author Karen Klein for "inking it" first. So what might be covered in this particular policy? The list could be long & would undoubtedly vary from company to company but here are just a few topics to contemplate:
- Privacy issues-theirs & the company's
- Posting on the job [about non-business related issues] or checking personal social media sites
- Creating posts that have some direct effect on individuals in the company or that may have an effect on the company's brand, products, or other in-house issues
- Revealing proprietary practices of your employer either directly or indirectly
- Misrepresenting the views of a company
- Writing anything that reflects poorly on company or brand that may lead to a loss in revenue
No Cost-benefit Analysis Required
I could continue but it should be apparent that there is no need to do a cost-benefit analysis to see that for most any company, NOT having a social media policy which would serve as protection for both the employer & the employee alike is a potentially expensive risk that is simply not worth taking.
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