Corporate Social Media Governance

An IBM employee, Jen Okimoto, who works in the domain of Web 2.0 has posted upon a very important issue ... access to and governance of social networking tools in Corporate America. Her questions are great, and are problems many corporations are trying to understand and address. It is not enough to just say ... my company should provide open access to all these various tools. One needs intelligent conversation on this topic. Thus, I will defer to Jen's blog post and ask you to link ... read ... and discuss on Jen's blog. Here are the questions she posted (see her blog for significant additional commentary):

1. How detailed should social media guidelines be?
2. When introducing social media into the workplace, how do we address HR concerns about reduced employee productivity?
3. How do you guide employees or manage employees in navigating the gray with respect to posting content that is or is not appropriate in the work environment?
4. What about content that falls squarely in the HR domain? What if employees use social media to publicize HR issues, or to gain "supporters" to their cause?
5. Do we have IBM or client examples of stats, use cases or any other stories that address these concerns?

This is an important discussion to be conducted.

Comments

[Kelly Monroe]

As an IT consultant I am fully aware that IT management is struggling with whether social media is productive or obstructive for companies and their employees. Software is being developed and policy and restrictions are being decided everyday by IT managers. The security of company networks are at stake but the potential for innovation using social media is a large enough carrot for the discussion of how to properly utilize the medium continues. Palo Alto networks came up with a whitepaper, http://bit.ly/d2NZRp, which will explore the issues surrounding social media in the workplace. It is important to not only understand the immediate benefits of doing business how one lives, but the threat it presents to a company's greater ROI and productivity when it comes to the server's safety and security.
If your IT Department wants to block social media apps on the company network... http://bit.ly/d2NZRp and http://bit.ly/cR80Al

[Chris Boudreaux]

As companies wrestle with business cases, metrics and cross-business-unit investments in capabilities such as security and compliance management, many companies are finding it helpful to start with a framework such as this one to organize and prioritize their efforts:

http://firstintheroom.com/posts/social-media-governance.html

And, for folks defining a social media policy, here is the largest online database of social media policies, for reference:

http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php

[Michele]

At my former company, the web team created an internal social network similar to Facebook. It was launched as part of the annual marketing kick-off. Our CMO mandated that everyone go in and create their page and use the tool. While some did, many did not. So the email demand to get your profile up was sent out. No one really understood the point of having this social network. Many were concerned about what they put up there. It eventually died as the CMO had other things to think about. Was it right for the CMO to push/demand this? The guidelines were tied to our corporate HR guidelines for corporate communications, but doesn't this open people up to more missteps? Look what happens with email and IM, think what you would get with social networks. While I love participating in social networks, one that was work related made me very uncomfortable.