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Mobilizing Your Social Media Workforce

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macbook-privacyHave you thought about the potential of mobilizing your entire workforce through social media rather than one or two individual voices?  What are the steps to harness the power of social media within the organization? I’ve been doing a lot of work in the area of social media policy development, training and governance over the past few years. A friend and colleague, Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman), CEO of social media training provider Comply Socially, shares my passion for educating companies on how they can leverage social media effectively.

I recently connected with Eric for a couple of reasons. First, it’s always great to catch up with friends. I also wanted to check out a demo of Comply Socially and discuss with Eric the best ways to mobilize a workforce to scale social media engagement.  Here’s the Q&A with Eric who shares his insights on the topic.

1. Why is it important for companies to not only develop a social media policy but to also provide training and governance?

Lawful social media policies are important because they give organizations a basis for governing how employees use social networks for work. They play a role in how employers manage social media risk and compliance. But most social media policies are unlawful.

In 2013, there were 28 National Labor Relations Board cases of wrongful terminations at Costco, EchoStar and other companies based on unlawful social media policies. So if you want to make sure your social media policy is lawful, don’t include any language that could be seen chilling workers rights to discuss wages, hours and working conditions. We have a free white paper on drafting social media policies for those who want to steer clear of the land mines.

But even if your social media policy is lawful, don’t expect anyone to actually read it. According to an NYU study of how many people actually read end user license agreements online before accepting them, only one or two out of every thousand retail software shoppers even open the license agreement when they make a purchase, and those few who do spend far too little time to read more than a small portion of the license text.

So if you want them to comply with your social media policy, they need social media policy training.

2. There is a lot organizations should be doing, but resources are always an issue. Why is social media policy training something they should do now?

What’s crazy is we spend so much time on crisis management and barely any time at all preventing them from happening. And crisis management is so much more expensive and so much less effective than preventative measures.

The first question you’ll be asked in a legal dispute is, “Was the employee trained?”

When there’s a case where the social media compliance issues weren’t discovered or where they were ignored, the consequences are exceedingly severe. Now’s the time to get in front of this because government regulations have spiked under the Obama administration. The new SEC chair Mary Jo White and the new FTC chair Edith Ramirez are more aggressive on enforcement.

Social media policy without training is lip service, because you can’t comply with a policy you don’t understand. You can’t protect yourself, or your organization, if you don’t understand the risks.  That’s why we introduced a self-paced social media policy training curriculum with assessments and certification management.

3.  What do most companies “fear” when it comes to employees or members of their organization participating in social media on their behalf?

They fear social media risk because it’s unmanageable. The risks are real. Their fears are warranted.

Damaged reputations can result in lost sales, lowered perceived value and long-term financial instability. You don’t have to be malicious to damage your employer’s reputation. Just choose an easy to hack password or fall for a social engineering scam, and you can obliterate brand value.

When the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the AP’s Twitter account and sent a bogus tweet about explosions in the White House, the Dow plunged 140 points.

Leaked proprietary data can jeopardize competitiveness. Think of how easy it is to your reveal your customers or suppliers by syncing your social networking connections with your web mail account. All it takes is a few clicks.

Being out of compliance with the increasingly complex rules and regulations around how companies can and can’t use social media can result in fines, investigations and complaints, draining worker productivity and lowering morale. It’s really easy for discrimination, harassment and defamation to creep out onto social networks.

Viruses and malware can cripple productivity and be very expensive to purge. And increasingly, as employees bring their own devices to work, access their employer’s wireless network and charge their batteries off the USB ports of employer owned hardware, the likelihood of security breaches and industrial espionage increases as well.

4. Why did you launch Comply Socially and how will your platform help companies to be more compliant in their social media communications?

After training thousands of communicators at federal government agencies, military commands, multinational corporations and non-profits and seeing them all hit the same brick wall, I thought there has to be a way to leverage eLearning to manage social media risk.

To authentically engage at a personal and local level, organizations are becoming less interested in enabling one or two voices to manage their corporate social media accounts, and much more intent on mobilizing their entire workforce to scale social media engagement. I wrote a white paper on this topic as well that you can download here if you’re interested.

5.  What are some good resources for companies who want to be frequently updated on social compliance?

iphone-trainingYou can sign up for the Social Media Compliance Newsletter at http://www.complysocially.com and follow the company on Twitter @complysocially. (Eric was also kind enough to set up a link for my blog readers to access one of their self-paced social media compliance trainings courses for free:  http://inter.viewcentral.com/reg/complysocially/deirdre)

I hope you will check out Comply Socially and share your thoughts about social media policies, training and compliance with us.

PR Practice #1: PR Policymaker Chart of Responsibilities

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Finally, my book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional” is done!  I just reviewed the cover and the manuscript is in its final form.  It was a fairly smooth process with only one slight hiccup.  After writing almost 300 pages, my publisher told me that I had to cut back to about 175.  That’s a lot of pages to cut!  As I removed chunks of copy, I also had to remove many of the graphics developed for the book, including eight charts, with each one relating to the roles the different practices.

For the next several PR 2.0 Strategies posts, I’ll be sharing these charts and discussing briefly the related roles and responsibilities.  The first chart cut was from Practice #1: The PR Policymaker.  You can see from the wheel diagram there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn and embrace, as you evolve into the PR Policymaker.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

The PR Policymaker is a professional who quickly learns that a crucial part of the communications strategy and planning process includes the development of social media policies, training, and governance. Not only developing social media policies, but also maintaining them falls within this new PR practice.

Here are a few of your new responsibilities:

Spearhead a Social Media Core Team: You and other social media champions in your organization will form a team responsible for vision and strategy.  This is also the team that creates the social media policy and guides the process.

Conduct a Social Media Audit: A social media audit allows you to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within your brand’s current social communications program. By evaluating your social properties, you’re also able to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what has been working with respect to participation and engagement in the social media landscape.  A few areas the audit focuses on include brand guidelines, types of content shared, frequency of content, levels of engagement, measurement, etc.

Establish Policy Objectives:  As a member of the communications department, you will have several of your own objectives for creating a social media policy, but so will other groups within the organization that want to accomplish specific goals. These groups may include HR, Legal, Marketing, IT, etc.  If you’re a PR policymaker, then you will help to build a policy to accomplish a variety of objectives fulfilling department objectives across the organization.

Guide the Policy Process:  Your natural liaison skills make it easy to help guide the policy process.  As a PR policymaker you may be coordinating team meetings across departments, assigning tasks to appropriate department champions and using your project management skills to get the policy written, reviewed and shared with your organization in a timely manner.

Create a Plan to Communicate the Policy: Writing the policy is only step one.  Step two includes delivering and supporting the policy the right way.  The PR policymaker has to develop a communications plan to introduce and inspire employees to embrace the policies.  A couple of examples include communication through interactive formats rather than long Word documents and considering a reward program for social media participation, as a part of employee recognition.

Measure Policy Compliance:  Another important part of the PR Policymaker process is measuring the behavior and usage of the policy. You can ask for feedback through employee questionnaires, informal interviews, polls, and by monitoring and evaluating employee internal participation and collaboration.  You will need your employee evangelists to be willing participants, and to also be that unified voice or army of champions who support and add value to the brand’s social presence.

Maintain the Policy: As a strategic communicator, the practice of the PR Policymaker does not stop with the first round of development.  In many organizations marketing and PR are responsible for maintaining and updating the policy every six months to a year and then working with different departments on implementation.  A good social media policy reflects where and how the organization communicates and the constant social media growth in different communities.

Are you currently involved in any of these roles and how are you managing your new responsibilities?

Book Review: The End of Business As Usual by @BrianSolis

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Happy New Year! I wanted to kick off the year with my book review of the End of Business as Usual by Brian Solis.  The video review is almost 10 minutes long so grab a drink and a snack 🙂  If you’re looking for a book to read in 2012 that challenges your thinking and makes you want to learn more about the consumer and information revolution, then watch this review.  Hope the information presented is helpful. Enjoy!

 
 

 

Responsibilities of the #PR Policymaker

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Stepping up to help champion the social media policy development process is a critical role in the organization; one well suited for the PR professional. From my experience, working with different companies and professionals, the PR policymaker (one of the eight new roles assigned) often gets the ball rolling with a clear vision of how to proceed, not to mention the energy and passion to rally the troops. Sometimes the latter is the most difficult!

Although every organization is different and the process should be customized to suit the company’s social communications program, here are a few best practice steps that have helped the PR policymaker and his/her team to build and communicate an effective policy:

–  Research or audit the brand’s social media properties to identify weak or potential areas of concern, with respect to social media communications, on the various platforms.

–  Work with senior management to determine who should join on the Social Media Core Team (a team of dedicated professionals who will work together to create vision and strategy) to help with policy development.  PR cannot build a social media policy in a vacuum.

–  Assemble your team and then set up dedicated times to meet/discuss policy development.

–  Work with members of the Core Team to develop questions to ask prior to policy development.  Highlighting the right questions will uncover important objectives, goals, liabilities, marketing needs, core areas of focus, etc.

–  Review policies from other similar organizations in your industry, or companies with similar business models, to identify potential areas of development. Share all findings and information with the Core Team members.

–  Identify specific areas to develop in the social media policy and work to divide the development (writing) process with other members of the team.  Remember, as the PR person, you don’t want to be writing the IT & social computing policy or the policy that addresses legal concerns, with respect to intellectual property rights and privacy laws.

–  Identify additional company policies that need to be incorporated into the social media policy (i.e., Code of Ethics, IT & Computing Policies, Employee Handbook, Brand Guidelines, etc.)

–  Provide summary recaps to keep the entire team up-to-date and working toward the goal of a final social media policy.  Share information on a collaborative platform to make the process easier and to cut down on email.

–  Develop a communications plan to introduce the policies to the organization’s directors or managers first (some training may be necessary in certain areas of policy enforcement) and then the steps to roll out the communication to the overall employee population.

–  Measure the behavior and usage of the policy by asking for feedback from employees through questionnaires, and by evaluating how employees participate in social communities.  Note: All insightful feedback should be included in updated versions of the policy.

–  Maintain the social media policy, which requires continuous development that usually takes place during yearly or six month communications planning sessions.

It’s important to remember that there is no set process or book of rules on how your company develops its policy or who will guide the process.  It usually takes a champion to get the initiative started.  Are you the PR policymaker champion in your organization?

How are you supporting your social media policy?

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Here’s a quick question for you to think about … How are you supporting your social media policy?  We build policies to guide our employee communications as well as how the public interacts with us through social media.  It’s important to think about the training and the tools and resources to help employees successfully implement your policy and to participate the right way.

My video offers suggestions on supporting your social media policy but I’d like to hear from you.  Please feel free to share how you are supporting your social media policy.

Enhanced Social Media Response Chart

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In preparation for my presentation last week to the members of the PRSA Alaska Chapter, I created an enhanced version of a Social Media Comment Response Chart.  The updated version includes three areas of comments: (1) Positive Comments, (2) General Brand/Product/Service Comments with various types of responses required based on the different kinds of inquiries and (3) Negative/Inappropriate Comments from the self promoter and spammer to the abusive commenter and constant complainers.  The chart also provides a look at who is involved in responding to the different categories of questions, as well as when to review/research the level of influence of the negative/inappropriate commenter.

I’ll be discussing this chart in detail during my PRSA Webinar on Tuesday, June 28th at 3:00 p.m. ET.  The chart is definitely work in progress and it will continue to develop over time.  I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

XYZ CO. SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENT RESPONSE CHART


Is Your Comment Response Chart Ready?

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Experience tells us that social media may lead to escalated levels of communication or crisis at any time.  Whether a company has contributed to a situation that upsets its customers, information is misunderstood, or there is a malicious attack on the brand, you have to be prepared.

Part of the readiness comes from developing a social media policy, which includes a Comment Response Chart, to guide the response and handling of the conversations.  The best Comment Response Charts are well rounded to show a range of conversations; from normal dialog and how to handle general questions (certain departments fielding specific inquiries) all the way up to the crisis situation.  There are basic Comment Response Charts, and although these companies should be applauded for taking the time to put them in place, it’s time to go to the next plateau.  Your organization must be prepared for the unplanned or unknown social media outbreak of negative information that is not necessarily represented on the simple Comment Response Chart.

How do you take the simple Comment Response Chart to the next level?  Here are four easy tips to think about when you are working on your organization’s chart:

  • Know Your Influencer: Don’t just evaluate the comment, but also research the commenter and that person and/or group’s influence.  Is this person a former customer, who is upset and you know that rectifying the situation will bring that individual back into your happy customer camp?  Or, is this a constant complainer who wants to be heard and included in changes in your product or service, or is it a troll that is a known as a company “hater” and won’t change his/her course of communication?  Knowing the different types of commenters, and their level of influence, will allow you to better understand how to handle the situation.
  • Create Levels of Conversation Escalation:  Decide before the crisis occurs your levels of escalation, and when certain personnel should get involved in the social media communications. Levels can range from department personnel handling the inquiries, and getting the proper information out through different networks, to including the PR department, the Public Information Officer (PIO) and also alerting executives and a crisis management team.  Knowing these levels will help to set guidelines, so that everyone knows when to involve other members of the company, before communication escalates and gets completely out of hand.
  • Let the Community Support Your Brand: Understand that there are times that you will rely on your community to answer questions and to provide information to peers.  In some cases they may be sticking up for or “fighting” for the brand.  If you jump into the conversation and take a stance too quickly it may appear defensive. At the same, you must be ready to have your employees release information at the right time to stop any miscommunication before it spreads. It’s important to identify the topics and instances that you feel are best handled by your community supporters vs. your own internal brand champions (your employees).
  • Add the Comment Response Chart to Your Crisis Plan:  You should integrate your Comment Response Chart into your company’s overall crisis plan.  The crisis management team needs to know the proper flow of information through social media and how social media is a part of all company communications, and not necessarily segregated or placed in a separate silo.  By having your Comment Response Chart integrated, all members of the crisis team will be aware of who handles the different channels of communication from traditional to digital and social media. For example, crisis can start in a traditional or digital situation on the organization’s website and make its way to social media.  The reverse is also true; it’s not uncommon for a social crisis to receive media attention (yes, that means reaching newspapers or digital media outlets, as well).  Having the entire team knowledgeable about the Comment Response Chart and the flow of proper information will allow the company to address crisis through all of the communications channels.

Of course these are only a few of the many tips to help advance your employees with their social media responses, whether interacting with a friendly and sometimes not so friendly public.  If you are proactive in your efforts and advance your Comment Response Chart prior to the crisis, your employees will be ready to handle the many situations that may arise, as they engage on the company’s behalf and in its best interest.

To Achieve Employee Buy-In You Have to Invest

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Yesterday, I conducted an all day learning workshop.  It was pretty intense, with only a couple breaks and a working lunch. The employees who participated in the workshop were there to learn about the new social media plan and policy recently adopted by the organization.  They spent the day listening to presentations, getting involved in several team exercises (both with their departments and people who they never worked with before) and watching videos from outside experts and companies.

Taking the time to communicate, educate and involve employees in your new initiative that’s poised to move the organization forward, makes people feel valuable and a part of the company’s growth.  It also motivates people to buy into a new program and to take action.  If a company wants an army of internal brand ambassadors, the company has to invest time and energy into creating those brand ambassadors.  Of course there will always be natural champions who surface.  These are the “Passionates” who raise their hands and want to immediately get involved. However, creating a broader learning environment and engaging more members of the company, means moving different people toward passion through education and team development.  Suddenly, you’ll find champions, you never knew existed in your company.

”It’s their job and they need to get on board” is not a good approach. Sure, in a tough economy, when companies aren’t spending a great deal on internal education, I’m sure this has been said a lot.  However, the reality is … if you want your employees to truly buy into your efforts and believe in the brand, you have to empower them, educate them and give them the tools that they need to succeed.  This is especially true with social media and employee participation. At the onset, social media to the employee may appear as “one more hat they have to wear.”  Of course, this type of thinking is not exclusive to social media.  Any change effort that necessitates a shift in culture (the mindset of the people), the process (management of systems and procedures) or the technology (infrastructure), should be introduced in a way that makes people feel a part of the process and working together toward a better solution.

Investing in your employees isn’t a one-time opportunity, it’s ongoing and the more you continue to empower, give trust and provide the right tools, the more they will feel motivated and use the tools to participate in programs that transform or advance your business.

Investment = Buy-In

 

 

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