In the world of enterprise IT, there are those who would say it’s an irrelevance, while others would say a necessary evil. Still more might say it is a creeping intrusion that will not go away anytime soon and must be dealt with, much in the way a doctor might treat a gangrenous limb before it corrupts the body entirely. The ‘it’ in this particular instance is social media.
There has been a sort of grudging admittance by many in the technology industry that social media have a purpose and usefulness in reaching out to customers and partners, providing a human face for a company, where previously that face may have been somewhat cold. There have even been instances where the use of social media has proved a great boon to a company in crisis, perhaps when under cyberattack, to keep in touch with concerned parties and ensure that all that could be done was being done. But no matter what way you look at it, social media is not going away anytime soon.
So what have Irish organisations been doing about it? Well, according to a survey from legal firm William Fry, largely ignoring it — or at least ignoring the need to manage it.
As we reported, the survey found that while 59% of employees reported using social media at work, 58% of them reported that their organisation had no social media policy.
Now, there are two major issues here that need to be separated.
The first is simply a productivity issue and whether it is looking up the sports results, browsing the Eurovision fall out, ordering new shoes or seeing what your more attractive and successful mates from college have been up to on their three week break in the Maldives is really irrelevant. If you allow unfettered access to the Internet in general to employees, then you run the risk of time lost and productivity reduced. So it is a good idea to have an acceptable usage policy, rather than an outright ban and most firms find that people, in the main, responsible and will abide by the rules. This applies to time spent on social media as much as it does to internet browsing in general.
The other issue is if employees use social media as part of their job, then there have to be very clear guidelines and rules as to what can be done, by whom and when.
It is all too common for a company to create Twitter account, for example, and have someone post tweets about what the company is up to, or perhaps drawing attention to certain offers in the consumer facing world. However, all too often this is entrusted to a junior person, with little experience, who can often forget that they are representing a body corporate and not themselves. There have been well documented cases of such people taking things personally and leaving a company with egg on its corporate face.
Where social media is used for customer support services, there needs to be clear guidelines as to what is appropriate as sometimes people can get a little over enthusiastic and go beyond what is appropriate for the channel
The opposite can also be true. Where social media is used for customer support services, there needs to be clear guidelines as to what is appropriate as sometimes people can get a little over enthusiastic and go beyond what is appropriate for the channel, often trying to resolve issues that would be more suited to more formal channels that can be better documented, and more critically, away from the public eye.
Another worrying element from the survey was that where policies were in place for social media, they were either ignored by employees (around half) or little understood (half again). Again we have all had the experience of EULAs when installing or updating software that are so long that to read them each time they appear would take longer than writing the bloody app in the first place!
A social media policy can’t fall into the same trap, but needs to cover certain points clearly and unambiguously. They must also be readable and comprehensible by people without a law or computer science degree if they are to be of any worth.
Finally, another issue highlighted by the survey is of great importance for IT pros. Where the use of sites such as LinkedIn involves work-related contact information the issue of ownership arises — does your employer have any right to such information or can they demand access to your profile? This is a thorny one and I’m going to go out on a limb. My understanding is that if you have registered a LinkedIn profile with an email address from your employer, then that profile and the information related to it belongs to your employer. If your profile is registered with a personal email address, then this is not the case.
That is my understanding and I’ll be researching that to see if it is true.
To my knowledge there have been few tests of such things to set precedents by which other cases can be judged, so it may take a test here to decide once and for all. But in the meantime, it may be worth checking your own profile on social media to see what it says and at least be aware what your situation.
Ltd
