Most of the companies with embarrassing moments in social media got there because some junior employee or kid fresh out of college thought they were helping the company by pumping up their positive reviews or attacking competitors using fake identities. It’s rarely a corporate-wide, organized scheme to trick consumers. Companies can avoid stuff like this through some basic education and social media policies.
What to do:
- Assume your employees are already involved in social media. Statistics show the majority of your employees are talking online in some form or another. It’s too late to debate whether or not you need to be concerned with this “social media stuff.”
- Create a policy. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or 50 pages long, but you need a resource your employees can rely on for guidance. The Blog Council (of which I’m the CEO) created a free toolkit you can use to help create your own.
- Disclose everywhere. Probably the No. 1 rule is to encourage employees to disclose their relationship with the company wherever they are when talking anything remotely close to business. It’s as simple as: “My name is ____, I work for _____, and this is my personal opinion.”