25 Jun Social Media

Confession: I spend WAY too much time on social media.  There, I said it!  I feel better…but I don’t plan on changing it!  Why do I spend so much time on social media?  Because I have a business, and social media is the best way to grow a business right now.  If you are not using social media to grow your business, you are missing out on the best free market out there!  But, like any good thing, if not managed correctly, social media can blow up your business or your life!

When anything hits the workplace that is new, our immediate reaction is to ban it or run from it.  There are a lot of organizations that have a “No Use” policy on social media.  Meaning, you can not be on it at work, and you can not mention your company at all on social media.  There are even a greater number of employers racing to create a policy to control their employees use of social media even when they are not at work.  So, the question remains, what do we do with social media?  Is it evil or just misunderstood?

I believe social media to be one of the best ways to grow a business today.  But, it has to be well managed.  We have all read the stories of people who have blown their lives up due to irresponsible use of social media.  But, I believe those situations simply expose a hiring and/or training issue within our company.  I think it is too easy to blame social media.  It didn’t create the problem.  It just exposed the problem.  Successful use of social media requires three things of our business:

1. Hiring:  It is now more important than ever to hire the right people for our companies.  If we rush to fill positions with any warm body willing to do the work for the least amount of pay, we lose the right to act surprised when their true character (as exposed by their social media use) causes problems for our company.
   
2. Training:  If we expect people to use the copier responsibly, don’t we train them how to do this?  Why are we not training our employees on how to properly use social media?  We must train our employees on this!  Not only because they can damage our company if they don’t understand the technology, but they can blow up their personal lives also.  If we truly care about our employees, we need to train them.  There are more important things at stake in their lives than the reputation of our company.
3. Monitoring:  Very rarely will someone drop an atom bomb on social media blowing up their professional and/or personal lives without first firing a few “warning shots” down range.  If we are not monitoring social media, we may miss the warning shots.  If we have an opportunity to coach people after we see these warning shots, we can often times avoid the atom bomb.  This is not Big Brother stuff in the George Orwell sense.  But, this is Big Brother in the “I love my kid brother enough to watch over him so he doesn’t get hurt” stuff.

I would love to help your company in these areas.  I have a powerful training that I can present to your staff that will show them the importance of responsible social media use.  We will talk openly about situations where people ended their careers, lost their families, and otherwise made a mess of their lives with social media.  By examining these situations, we can better protect your employees.  And, after the training, I would be happy to sit down with your Human Resources and answer questions about using social media in the Hiring and Monitoring aspects.  Why wait until you have a problem?  Let’s put some things in place to protect our team members.  If we do that well, our company will be well protected also!

What do you wish someone told you about social media?