Employees Are Social Media Marketers. Should Companies restrict Employees' Social Media use? It is not uncommon to see companies restricting (or even worse, banning) use of Social Networking sites by their employees. I don’t think that this is a step in the right direction. If companies can trust their employees to run business, can’t they be trusted when it comes to using Social Media in an acceptable way? IBM is a great example of how companies should handle employees’ use of Social Media. IBM has approximately 400,000 employees spread through out the world, still it allows them to use Social Media without much restrictions.
Casey Hibbard has written an excellent blog post on how IBM uses Social Media to spur employee innovation (see this link). As per Casey’s post, IBM lets employees communicate with each other and the public over Social Media channels without intervention. Watch this CNBC interview with Adam Christensen, IBM’s Social Media Communications Manager and John Abell, New York Bureau chief, Wired.com. Corporate Social Media Policies: The Good, the Mediocre, and the Ugly. CNN’s senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, was shown the door Wednesday after sending a tweet that expressed respect for the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Despite a lengthy explanation of her 140 character foot-in-mouth, CNN brass stood by their decision. The news organization has pretty clear guidelines about how its employees (and freelancers and interns) should represent themselves on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media destinations.
That got us thinking: Of all the corporate social media policies out there, which are intelligent and balanced, and which are draconian? We've compiled several examples here--but are still looking for more (email us your company's policy to ideas@fastcompany.com and we'll add it to the mix). The news organization's policy was published on the blog of a terminated employee. The original post has the entire policy, but here are the highlights (all-caps emphasis is theirs): Intel BestBuy Walmart Ford 5.Play nice. Comment les collectivités s'impliquent dans le Dialogue citoyen. 15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Creating and maintaining a corporate blog, or a blog of any sort for that matter, isn't always the easiest of tasks and doesn't come naturally to most people.
There are a lot of considerations to take into account — theme, topics, audience, content, design, writers, multimedia, promotion, writing style, comment policies, and so on. Above and beyond all of that, you also need to consider the blog's name and URL. Although the act of creating blog posts can be quite simple, forethought and planning must first go into the creation of a corporate blog in order to keep the processes running smoothly, especially if multiple bloggers are involved. We recently outlined 10 tips for corporate blogging for businesses hoping to focus on key elements of creating a blog in the corporate world. 1. 2. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.