Social Media Policies in the Workplace

This is an interesting infographic on corporate social media policies. It’s a pretty interesting graphic but, as with most social media policy conversations it only focuses on either brand protection, promoting the brand, or employee freedom. The problem is that there’s another huge opportunity in between that the Infographic touches on but doesn’t go into enough detail about…

Productivity!

The ability to network with peers, professionals, vendors and clients provides an opportunity for corporations to quickly provide and extract information. Rather than sitting on the phone or trying to read through documentation and help files, your employees can get online and connect with other users, vendors or consultants to get the information they need to get the job done.

As well, this can be used for recruitment, competitive research, surveys, customer relations… there’s so many advantages to the social business! And with 70.7% of companies blocking social media sites, there’s an incredible opportunity for your company to leapfrog them by taking advantage of the medium.

The other factor to note here… with smartphones in double-digit growth, companies are fooling themselves by thinking they’re blocking social media sites. This reminds me of the good ‘ol days of the Internet, where only a couple employees in the most key positions had access to the Internet and the rest of us had to quietly work on a crappy Intranet. We just gave it all up and played Solitaire instead.

Why in the world would you block your employees from connecting with other professionals? If your employees are on Facebook and being unproductive, that’s not a Facebook or security issue, that’s a performance issue… fire them! Good leaders remove roadblocks, not add them.

A quote from the Infographic:

Today, companies are implementing social media policies of all shapes and sizes – and it’s no wonder why: every month we hear of another PR disaster because of a single tweet gone awry. This has led many companies to ban the use of social media completely while employees are at work. But other companies are taking the opposite approach, believing that a generation raised on technology is more productive when allowed to use it at their own discretion.