Big oaks from
little acorns grow. Big corporations started life as an SME at some point. This
means that you need to start as you mean to go on; it’s really tough to change
the way people do things once they’ve got into a habit.
This means that –
even before you start recruiting your first member of staff – you need to have
established what you expect from them in relation to the company’s reputation.
In fact, back up a
step. When you are recruiting new staff, don’t forget to check out their online
activity. It will be a good indicator as to how they manage their personal
reputation and ensure you dot the Is and cross the Ts if you have any
reservations before they start work for you.
Salutary tale!
A company was recruiting and had interviewed a number of people, finally
settling on one young woman, who performed well at interview and had a good
supporting CV. Then someone remembered
to check out her social media.
To say it was peppered with expletives is underselling the facts. After some consideration they decided that
this wasn’t the kind of language they wanted in their workplace and offered the
job to their second choice.
Interestingly, the original choice candidate never knew why she didn’t
get the job.
The minute you
start employing people you need to have a simple social media policy in place.
The big companies usually have a comprehensive social media policy, but the
kind of policy that they have isn’t appropriate for a small organisation.
We all know people
who work for bigger organisations and abuse their employer by spending far more
than their break time updating their social media for personal reasons. Some
bigger organisations ban social media use, but that’s not good business for two
reasons:
- If you treat people like children they will respond accordingly and simply use their smartphones to access their social media – and, possibly, brag about putting one over on their employer.
- If you stop people using social media at work, you’re missing an opportunity for them to use it positively to promote your business.
The challenge for
all businesses, but particularly smaller ones, is to get it right from day one
and then keep the momentum going.
Treat people like
adults – lay out the ‘rules’ (your social media policy) and explain how you
would like them to use the world of the web and then trust them to stick to
that.
That doesn’t mean
abdicating any responsibility. It’s part of your job to monitor your reputation
so a weekly search of the web for comments about your organisation, you
personally and, possibly, individuals on your team is good practice.
If you discover members of staff who don’t comply with the social media policy they’ve agreed to, then you – and they – must know exactly what action you will take if they step over the acceptable line. This may differ depending on the type of transgression.
And, given that so many small businesses use outsourced services, it’s equally important that all contractors understand your policies about social media and that these extend to them. In fact, have the social media policy included in the contract.
