Social media - deny nothing!
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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An extraordinary piece of control freakery by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia over its employees’ use of Facebook recently shows how some enterprises are still thrashing round working out how to deal with social media.  It reinforces the view that companies need sensible policies for social networks, in a world that is becoming more complicated.

According to the International Business Times (Australia), the bank instituted a rule whereby employees could be fired if their Facebook accounts carried “unsavoury” remarks about their employer.  Didn’t matter if the remarks were put there by a friend – or even how innocent they were – it seems the employee could still be out.

The Australian Finance Sector Union weighed in, telling the bank that its rule “restricts the use of social media both at work and beyond in a way that is not only… discriminatory but also severely restricts employees’ freedom of expression”.  The bank caved in, revising the policy and agreeing to meet the union over its continuing concerns.

Meanwhile the union’s national secretary Leon Carter offered his own five tips on using social media; “deleting an ill-thought comment doesn’t necessarily remove it from the internet” was one of them, and another was “use a pseudonym or post anonymously on news articles and public blogs”.  He also advised members to familiarise themselves with their employers’ social media policies. 

Yes, but who makes those policies and what else should they take into account?  The IT consultancy Gartner has a few ideas, posing seven critical questions that need to be asked before an organisation develops a policy of its own.

A cross-section of the company’s population should be involved in the policy creation process, it advises – and other questions to be addressed include who will monitor employees’ social media activity and how will managers be trained to coach employees on its use.  These all sound remarkably like roles for corporate information managers – especially as the guidelines draw a distinction between high level policy and operational processes, which may use social media (such as recruitment or customer support).

Social media are also implicit in a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit which finds that business complexity has grown significantly since the financial crisis and that most companies are ill-prepared to deal with it.  The single biggest cause is greater customer expectations – and social media must have their part to play in that.

As they do in the spread of rumours.  Research led by the Kellogg School of Management, reported in the Economist, advises companies not to bother denying them – because to do so merely reinforces their believability.  All the same, it’s probably helpful to know what not to deny – and that’s surely another job for the info pros.

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