Do your employees tweet? Do they blog? Do they post to Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube? Do you even understand these questions?

Does your organization have a policy regarding social networking and your business? Do you have a policy regarding social communications on the job, or off the job, or both?

With the rise of the latest social networking technology—Twitter and Facebook—added to the earlier fad of blogging, companies are faced with new communications challenges. What are the rules of the business road for employees using these high-tech approaches to low-tech interactions—including spreading rumors, gossip, and gripes about the company?
 
Conversely, how can an organization mobilize these powerful tools to advance its products, messages, and goals? For example, does your firm use social media to recruit and vet employees or market your products? Do you Google job applicants, and how do you use that information? Do you monitor blogs about your company and your business and, again, how do you use that data?

Questions Without Clear Answers Still Demand a Response

Today, these are questions without uniform answers. But they are drawing increased attention as firms face the reality that employees have new, remote ways of communicating with friends and colleagues and customers and prospects, beyond the 20th-century technologies of meetings, telephone, letter, and email. Many firms have just recently faced up to the notion of the Internet and have been clobbered by the new means of communication. One wishes that Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) were still alive to contemplate the brave new world of social media.

Advertising Age columnist B.L. Ochman recently wrote that “many corporations are still scared of social media.” She noted that some large companies block employee access to the Internet, personal email, and other social media, on the grounds that these cost the organization employee productivity. She counters, “The value to workers of having Internet access—in terms of research, communication and speed—is far greater than the threat of lost productivity.”

Social Media Let You Learn from Your Customers

Ochman also raises the issue that these technologies allow customers new and faster ways to trash the company, saying “mean, nasty things about our brand” online. Perceptively, she notes that this is useful information. “Well,” she says, “there may be things you need to change about your brand, and in that case, you should thank them for letting you know what they are. Then you should make changes.”

Soren Gordham, a columnist for Mashable, The Social Media Guide, commented in early 2009, “Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.” (See the sidebar for an example of one utility’s social media efforts.)

I was at a hearing before the West Virginia Public Service Commission not long ago concerning a proposed high-voltage transmission line crossing private land in West Virginia and Maryland. One of the opponents to the line cited the fact that her power—supplied by Allegheny Energy—dropped off daily. It was a brief outage, but enough to require her to restart her computer and reset her clocks.

I’ve had the same experience, although not quite as frequently. When Allegheny Energy was running radio ads awhile ago, they called their ads “Allegheny Energy moments.” That’s how I referred to their tiny outages in my blog.

I doubt if the company knew about, or paid attention to, these brief but annoying outages. The complaints get the attention of low-level management, at best, and are not part of a pattern. But I bet if they were paying attention to Twitter and Facebook, the company might have a better sense of how its customers and employees viewed the company. (A check of the Allegheny Energy web page gives no indication of any kind of awareness of social media.)

Policies Are Slowly Evolving

Smart companies are increasingly aware of the issues that social media raise. Media technologist Chris Boudreaux is writing an online book about the subject and is collecting a useful compendium of companies’ policies on the subject. The Washington Post recently promulgated rules for its employees on how to tweet and post to social media, prompting some grumbles from its employees that the newspaper just doesn’t get how the new media work.

An early Facebook expert, Clara Shih, published a very useful book on the subject last April, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. She’s an evangelist for the business pluses of social networking, arguing that the technologies provide “a much more personalized interaction with a very large number of people,” including employees, business partners and suppliers, and customers.

Legal Issues

But act with caution. There are myriad legal issues to consider when it comes to social media and business organizations, as a recent webcast on HR.com—sponsored by the cutting-edge employment law firm of Littler Mendelson, based in California—demonstrated. As partner Kevin O’Neill commented about social media and employment law, “The landscape is littered with land mines,” and “a perfect storm is brewing out there.”

Among the areas where social media and employment issues can collide are employee use on-the-job and off-the-job, management use of social media in recruiting and retention, use of social media in union organizing campaigns, privacy rights for employees and employers, and several others. It is, as songwriter Randy Newman has said, “a jungle out there”: Employees have been fired for blogging on the job; courts have upheld private, members-only blogs involving company employees; and the implications of Twitter are just starting to enter the consciousness of the employment world.

According to the HR.com presentation, half of employers lack a policy to address an employee’s use of social networking. A quarter have disciplined an employee for “improper activities on social networking sites,” and a majority “do not actively monitor their workers’ use of social networking websites.” Those figures come from a late September 2009 report (PDF) by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association Survey. According to the HR.com presentation, Delta, Google, Wells Fargo, and Starbucks have terminated employee-bloggers who violated employment contracts.

Many laws in many jurisdictions are relevant to employment and social media, and the law is playing catch-up, noted O’Neill. Among the relevant federal statutes, observed Littler partner Philip Gordon, are the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Railway Labor Act. According to the Littler group, 33 states have laws, mostly related to off-duty conduct, that protect employees against adverse action.

For HR professionals, company communicators, and high-level managers, this is a fertile and uncertain field. Littler’s Gordon, a subject matter expert, runs a worthwhile blog for those who want to keep current on the legal aspects.

Ad Age’s Ochman offered a positive summary of the issue: “If you don’t already have a social-media policy, you need to create one. If you don’t trust your employees to talk to customers, or to present the brand, you need to look at (1) your hiring practices, (2) your training practices.”

Littler’s O’Neill offered caution. Noting that much of social media consists of “spontaneous blurting,” he said, “The spontaneous blurt and the workplace can be a very dangerous combination.” He agrees with Ochman that companies need to create social media policies.

—Kennedy Maize is MANAGING POWER’s executive editor.