Employees with social media access more likely to talk you up
At Rabbit we have a very simple argument for organisations wanting to stop worker Facebook or Twitter access. With more people set to go online via their mobiles than desktops within four years (this stat via Ben Kunz), your efforts are likely to be futile. Much better to have an internal social media policy in place instead.
Here’s another reason: Allowing workers to use social media won’t result in them talking you down, just the opposite actually. Forrester came out with pretty damning research among 5500+ information workers in North America and Europe, to find out whether they’d be more likely to be ‘detractors’ or ‘ambassadors.’
Half of (49%) of information workers are detractors, and only 27% are promoters, or a net score of minus 23%. Not surprisingly, directors are promoters but workers – and also supervisors – are detractors. So forget the notion of middle management always being on your side.
However at the same time, this statistic is worth nothing. According to Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff in AdAge:
“In case you’re wondering if you should allow employees onto social networks (and trust me, you can’t stop them), try this fact on: workers who use social media are among the most positive. 48% would strongly recommend a company’s products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% — among the highest of the groups we surveyed.”
My theory for why this is, is two-fold. First of all, in a lot of companies still adopting an attitude that’s at least five years out of date, only marcoms professionals whose job it is to actually monitor and respond on social media, are given access.
Secondly, I wonder if an instinctive reflex to defend your ‘tribe’ kicks in. So you might proactively mouth off about your boss or the stuff your company makes to friends and family, but seeing a stranger criticise them online is different.
I’d also agree with Ann All of IT Business Edge, letting workers use social media shows that you trust them to act responsibly. Another reason for bosses to stop treating workers like children when it comes to social media access. If you treat them like adults, they’ll more often than not respond in kind and become your advocates.
Related articles
- Employees Using Facebook, Smartphones More Likely to Promote Company (pcworld.com)
- Would Your Employees Promote Your Company? (adage.com)
- 10 Must-Know Advantages & Disadvantages of Social Media (thoughtpick.com)
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Thanks Chris for the comment and for the link, which is really interesting.
Yes for sure, I agree that there need to be guidelines in place that evolve, much as the tools that we use do.
At the end of the day though the debate about social media use at work, reminds me a little bit of the email debate that happened 10-15 years ago
We’re both old enough to remember it, and at the time there was horror within orgs that staff would be using this new communication tool to contact their mates in work time and / or make comments about the company.
Much as is happening now, at the time all sorts of case studies were also appearing in the trade press about how companies were at risk – indeed I had a firm of solicitors as a client back then and one of our jobs was to get them publicity off the back of all this stuff.
The tools have obviously changed, as well as the damage that they can create, but the principle is I think the same.
Email policies are now the norm within companies and in 2-3 years time the ‘block or not’ debate will have changed to one around management and empowerment….or I hope so anyway!
Totally agree with the premise and the arguments here Dirk, but would also like to add another factor into the mix wrt opening up social media/social media guidelines and policies.
The more staff who are on a social network (e.g. Facebook) the more they may be tempted to communicate corporate news/events/opinions via that network rather than via closely-managed and firewalled email systems.
When the new Facebook messaging system kicks in, this is something that major orgs will have to contend with – after all we all know who ‘owns’ the data that passes through Facebook, don’t we? And it’s not the company itself.
I’m all for giving people access to social media channels for all of the reasons you list, but do think in a year (or sooner) companies may need more draconian (not less) guidelines in place about what sort of corporate-related information can be shared via social media – even innocently… (see http://www.brewdigital.com/blog/why-facebook-wave-potentially-dangerous-businesses for more on this, if you’re interested)