You’ve been social marketing for a while now.
And you realize that unless you engage others consistently, your reach is limited.
You want to get other people in your organization liking and commenting on your shares.
You want your co-workers outside of marketing and PR to get on social media too, cause if you can engage them, your shares will more consistently reach a broader audience.
But the boss is petrified that if everyone starts tweeting at work, someone’s going to say something that gets your organization in trouble. What kind of trouble?
Well, consider this. If you’re a marketing or PR professional, you’re skilled in the business of public disclosure.
But your colleagues don’t have those same skills. They’re inexperienced at participating in conversations that go on and shape the public record.
Even with the best of intentions, they might say something that damages your reputation, compromises data security or inadvertently break the law. There are plenty of laws to break. More than you may care to know.
So what do you do? How do you get your arms around social media risk?
The answer is not what you think.
No one reads your social media policy. They sign for it and put in the bottom drawer. Only 2 out of every 1000 users even open the terms of use for onine services before accepting them, and those that do stay just a few seconds according to an NYU study. Social media policies justify governance, but they don’t change employee behavior.
Social media policies are necessary but insufficient for social media risk management. What’s required is enterprise-wide social media education for employees, assessment and certification.
And with time off the job the number one cost of employee training, and the impracticality teaching social media risk and compliance int he classroom, self-paced eLearning has arisen as the leading modality for delivering social media policy training.
If you build your own, custom, self-paced social media policy training , be sure to allocate resources for keeping it up to date. The social networks change their platforms and introduce new features regularly and the courts are handing down verdicts based on the new laws governing social media usage regularly.
The law firm Morrison and Foerster publishes a free newsletter focused on tracking those development. At Comply Socially, we update sour courseware quarterly so employees receive current instruction and guidance.
Today’s workforce communicates and gets information through social media. It is a mainstream communications channel. 87% of companies use and 23% of online time is spent on social media. And the more people who talk about you on social media, the further the conversation carries.
Reach is determined by scale.
Scale engagement means broadening access and usage to achieve measurable business results. So whether you develop it yourself or purchase it from a provider like us, social media education for employees is a critical, strategic component of managing social media risk.