Social Media Policy: Protecting Yourself and Your Project Team

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Talent Management  

Is your project team a responsible group of people? Perhaps you only get to see their “business side” at the office or on a conference call, but have you had an opportunity to get a good look at their “semi-private side”? By semi-private (or semi-public if you prefer), I refer of course to their online social persona.

There is a certain amount of trust that a company needs to have in its employees. That being said, there is also a degree of prudence employers must exercise in order maintain a secure organization. Many firms perform background checks that not only look at criminal records and similar data for staff, but also show details on their various social media endeavors. An extension of this has been the policy of some firms to intimidate workers into giving up their passwords for these sites so that the material can undergo more stringent examination.

Rather than dig into the lives of each of its hires and potentially expose themselves to lawsuits, many organizations are adopting a social media policy that they incorporate into their employment packets. By getting employee buy-in to the policy, the material helps each associate assess what social media services and activities are appropriate for company and non-company use, including the use of company equipment. Particularly in our technology-rich activities, it is important to enact a…

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