Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become a common “virtual” place for people to interact with each other both professionally and socially. These applications can have a positive impact on business in terms of marketing the brand and networking but they can also cause a cyber-headache.
The likelihood is that some, if not most of your employees, are using at least one of these applications. Your company brand could be on their profiles without you knowing it. This means that anything they say or do on their pages could reflect on your brand.
Through Christmas function there is the opportunity for employees to gain more of a friendly footing with clients and therefore add them to their personal pages. This could cause your company problems if your employee is regularly updating their pages with offensive remarks or defamatory comments. Worse still if they started to ‘tweet’ about the boring client they had lunch with not knowing that the boring client is following them on twitter.
If you have not already got a policy to deal with this, it would be sensible to introduce a social media policy. The policy should define what employees can and cannot disclose on their personal pages i.e. your company name, their views when related to your business and also their virtual conduct in general when it can be linked back to your company.
Without a clear policy, employees could naively put your business at risk. It also makes it more difficult to challenge a comment which has been made by your employee, especially if you only hear of it on the grapevine. However, the damage caused by the comments can be far more difficult to deal with.
We hope you all have a fantastic Christmas and an exciting New Year! If you’ve missed out on the Christmas Countdown, you can now find days 1-12 here
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @HPC_HRservices, we’ve got alot to look forward to in 2014 and we want you all to be a part of it.