Category: Social Media

Why your company needs a social media policy by Alison DeNisco.  Available from <http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-your-company-needs-a-social-media-policy/> [November 2, 2016, 4:00 AM PST]

Only 51% of employees report that their workplace has rules about social media use at work, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey—which means half of the workforce is potentially at risk for litigation and security breaches.

A social media policy is just as necessary for companies as discrimination, leave, and vacation policies, said Daniel Handman, a labor and employment litigator and a partner at Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP. Legal problems can arise for businesses if employees say something negative about the company, reveal confidential information, or say something positive about the company without disclosing their affiliation, he said.

“The most important issue is when an employee says something negative, which has been the subject of a tremendous amount of litigation,” Handman said.

The largest government player in social media law is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, allows all employees the right to engage in “concerted activities” for the “mutual aid and protection” of coworkers, which the board extends to social media activities. Therefore, any policy that prevents employers from their right to express such concerns would be considered invalid.

“If you work at McDonald’s and say, ‘The hamburgers are terrible,’ that’s not protected,” Handman said. “But if you say, ‘I’m getting lousy tips because the kitchen sucks,’ that is protected,” because it relates to a working condition that impacts coworkers, he said.

Risks and benefits

Seven out of 10 employees use social media at work, according to a recent report from Bambu by Sprout Social. Half of employees report using social media for up to an hour per day at work.

Full-time and part-time employees reported going on social media for a number of personal and professional reasons, the first of which were to take a mental break from their job (34%), and to connect with family and friends (27%), according to the Pew Research Center survey. But many also used social media to make or support professional connections (24%), get information to solve problems at work (20%), and build relationships with coworkers (17%).

While having an official social media presence can enhance an organization’s communication, recruitment, research, and client base, using social media at work for either professional or personal involves the following risks, according to SHRM:

• The possibility for hackers to commit fraud and launch spam and virus attacks.
• The risk of people falling prey to online scams that seem genuine, resulting in data or identity theft or a compromise of the company’s computer security.
• A potential outlet for negative comments from employees about the organization.
• Legal consequences if employees use these sites to view or distribute objectionable, illicit or offensive material.

In a recent survey report from Smarsh, nearly half of respondents cited social media as the communication channel with the highest level of compliance risk.

“Concerns about electronic communications policies, policy enforcement, and retention gaps remain high, indicating many firms are vulnerable to undetected fraud, errors, and potential regulatory enforcement penalties,” the report stated. Less than half of respondents said that they are mostly or completely confident that their current strategies will identify risks for the organization, the report stated.

Some experts also blame social media on falling workplace productivity. But these platforms are not the root cause, according to Aliah Wright, a social media expert at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and author of A Necessary Evil: Managing Employee Activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…and the Hundreds of Other Social Media Sites.

“Companies need to treat the people they hire like adults,” Wright said. “You trust them to do the job you hired them to do. If their productivity slacks off, that’s a productivity issue, not a social media issue. If people are always at the coffee maker, you don’t get rid of the kitchen. Social media is not the problem—the problem is with time management, which can be corrected.”

Creating a policy

Company leaders should generally allow employees to use social media during work hours, said Wright. “Social media is ubiquitous for us—it’s our new telephone, and it’s not going anywhere,” Wright said. “Social media is the way in which we connect not just with friends, but with our Rolodex.”

But policies can make a difference in how often employees use these platforms, the Pew study found: At companies that do have a social media policy, 30% of workers said they use social media while on the job to take a break—compared to 40% of workers whose employers do not have such policies.

Many companies devised social media rules based on Walmart’s policy, Wright said, which the NLRB gave a stamp of approval to in 2012.

Social media policies should align with the company’s culture and industry, Wright said. Organizations should tap different divisions, including public affairs, legal, and marketing when composing social media policies, she added.

Wright recommends a social media policy include the following:

• Names of those in the company who are allowed to speak on the company’s behalf on these platforms. If an employee is contacted via Facebook with a question or concern about the company, should they forward it to a certain company representative?
• Guidelines for how inappropriate postings, which may include discrimination or threats of violence, will be responded to.
• Training procedures, including informing employees what information is allowed to be shared. Since many people do not log off of social networks, informing them about multi-factor authentication options can also help protect information, Wright said.

Company leadership must ensure strong cyber protections are in place to secure data, Wright said. “If you’re not teaching employees about proper password hygiene, that could be blamed on you as a company,” Wright said.

Legal monitoring

About half of states now have laws on the books preventing employers from requesting passwords to personal social media accounts to get or keep a job.

However, “an employer can under the law monitor an employee’s use of technology, email, or the internet, so long as they advise the employee that they’re doing so,” Handman said. He recommends consulting with a lawyer before taking punitive action against an employee based on something that occured on social media, he said.

Some 32% of employees reported that their employer has policies about how employees should conduct themselves on the internet in general, according to the Pew survey.

But monitoring employee social media activity on a regular basis is unusual, Wright said. “I don’t think a lot of companies have time to play Big Brother,” she added. Some employ programs that monitor their brand and what employees post to promote it. “I don’t know any company that has enough dedicated staff to spy on employee social media,” she said.

Why your company needs a social media policy by Alison DeNisco.  Available from <http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-your-company-needs-a-social-media-policy/> [November 2, 2016, 4:00 AM PST]

Grow Your Business: Using Social Media and Traditional Marketing by Dan Arens, Business Growth Advisor.  Available from <http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/story/33572146/grow-your-business-using-social-media-and-traditional-marketing> [Posted: Nov 02, 2016 4:59 AM CST  Updated: Nov 02, 2016 8:39 PM CST]

Who can forget the epic commercial of the tiny little Chihuahua saying “I think I need a bigger box?” That advertisement ushered in a new era of marketing for Taco Bell. The year was 1998. Since then, with the advent of social media, the world of branding has changed forever. How did it happen and what can we do about it?

Several decades ago a few television networks, film companies, magazine corporations, and newspaper publishers virtually controlled what consumers saw and heard. Consumer marketing companies had to ‘pay to play’ in the market if they were looking to introduce, secure, or build their product. If you wanted to market your product, it usually involved some form of media in order to establish your brand in the marketplace. Traditionally, advertising was the vehicle of choice. All of that has changed.

As technology advanced in the form of devices like the digital video recorder, the consumer began making a turn toward more selective viewing by skipping ads, which resulted in giving them the power to select what they wanted to see. The internet itself gave the consumer the opportunity to avoid having to read anything that was hardcopy related, such as a newspaper or a magazine. Branding was undergoing a sea change in the shifting of power from the consumer marketing companies to the ultimate decision maker, that of the individual consumer or customers themselves.

According to Douglas Holt, the author of How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, social media has played a pivotal role in our culture. It has taken society away from mass marketing to having a direct impact on societal groups, via social networks. The members of each social network have become the individual influencers for product purchases. Holt calls these individual groups crowdcultures.

As Holt points out, metrics compiled over the past ten years support the position that standard branding approaches are failing to deliver in the social media arena. He says “In YouTube or Instagram rankings of channels by number of subscribers, corporate brands barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube 500. Instead you’ll find entertainers you’ve never heard of, appearing as if from nowhere.”

Red Bull, a well known energy drink is a seemingly successful story of bridging the gap between traditional marketing and the utilization of social media. They are maintaining their presence with standard branding techniques, while they are also ranked number 184 on YouTube with slightly under five million subscribers. As a means of comparison, author Holt points out that Dude Perfect, a YouTube phenomenon that shows “trick shots and goofy improvised athletic feats” does much better than Red Bull. Dude Perfect is in position 81 with about 8 million subscribers.

Holt believes ‘crowdcultures’ are now the influencers and innovators in the branding process. With amateurs and individuals producing their own quality video content, consumer marketing companies are unable to compete. He cites Dove soap as an example of a company that used ‘crowdcultures’ and social media for initiating campaigns that supported cultural change in the beauty industry. Dove soap took the position of supporting “real beauty” as Holt says, they “tapped into this emerging crowd culture by celebrating real women’s physiques in all their normal diversity- old, young, curvy, skinny, short, tall, wrinkled, smooth. Women all over the world pitched in to produce, circulate, and cheer for images of bodies that didn’t conform to the beauty myth.” For a glimpse of what the crowd culture can do, go to www.YouTube.com and use the keyword Dove Soap.

While the traditional branding model was more from the top down in the use of advertising to promote and solidify a brand strategy, the social media approach is more along the lines of a bottom up approach for branding. The creativity developed by consumers (with or without the help of a marketer) appears to be a key in the success of a social media strategy.

It is clear the dynamics of product branding are very fluid at this time in the social media arena. It is also quite obvious that most businesses are being challenged with how to get involved. From a business growth perspective, author Holt suggests that you identify your current culture, look at alternatives that will “open up an opportunity”, identify some ‘crowdcultures’ that might work in your industry, strive to get the word out in that industry, and then continue to change your message as the culture changes.

Grow Your Business: Using Social Media and Traditional Marketing by Dan Arens, Business Growth Advisor.  Available from <http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/story/33572146/grow-your-business-using-social-media-and-traditional-marketing> [Posted: Nov 02, 2016 4:59 AM CST Updated: Nov 02, 2016 8:39 PM CST]

WHY FACEBOOK IS A GREAT AVENUE TO INCREASE AUDIENCE REACH Posted By: Mark Olson.  Available from <http://imsoup.com/13886/why-facebook-is-a-great-avenue-to-increase-audience-reach/> [October 26, 2016]

Facebook has proven itself to be one of the best social media platforms in terms of connecting with family, friends, and even in gaining new contacts for one’s business. Ten years of groundbreaking innovations have made Facebook a force to reckon within the internet marketing industry.

With great success also comes the gut-wrenching pains. Due to the resounding success of using Facebook for social media marketing, business owners drove in flocks trying to take advantage of Facebook’s advertising schemes and gain a foothold in the internet marketing industry. In recent years, internet marketing dreams were easily achieved through Facebook. With everyone building up campaigns on Facebook, the platform is now an arena for marketers to strut their stuff. The arena is now very competitive—thus the increase in costs.

Facebook is now at its peak in terms of social media marketing power. With billions of dollars’ worth of experimentations, it now seems most marketers have seen the ups and downs of utilizing social media for their marketing campaigns.

Increasing one’s audience reach is one of the common goals of marketers on Facebook. Increasing the audience size increases the chances of your content getting shared. Increased sharing conversely increases widens your audience reached and increases the chances of conversions.

An article on Search Engine Journal shares 7 ways to increase reach on Facebook:

Here are some of the major points from the article:

• Engage your audience with good images
• Regularly use automatic bidding
• Automatic target placement increases your chance of success
• Avoid overlapping your ads
• Avoid frequently changing your campaigns
• Achieve your goals through reach campaigns
• Using Lifetime Budget helps

With these tips, it would be much easier for marketers to focus on their campaign goals and reach out to the neglected audience on Facebook. Facebook is a very accessible tool and very easy to use. Every business owner should take advantage of this great social media platform.

WHY FACEBOOK IS A GREAT AVENUE TO INCREASE AUDIENCE REACH Posted By: Mark Olson.  Available from <http://imsoup.com/13886/why-facebook-is-a-great-avenue-to-increase-audience-reach/> [October 26, 2016]