Letting your employees use social tools

by Fabrice Calando on May 27, 2011

Letting your employees use social tools

I’m always surprised when I speak with employees that are are prevented from accessing different social media tools. It’s particularly amusing when the employer asks to implement social media initiatives and none of the employees in charge can participate or even test out new applications. I wonder what it looks like to the end-users.

Why do companies block social networks?

We always hear the same reasons for blocking access to sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube:

  • Employees are just going to wast their time. I would answer that with a question: Do your employees work only 9 to 5 and take all their brakes? I’m ready to bet they don’t — we’re all putting in more hours at work. We work on the evenings and weekends and check our emails wherever and whenever. If they’re giving you more of their time, you can give them Facebook and Twitter…
  • They’ll say something stupid. If you don’t trust your employees why did you hire them in the first place? They’re your most important asset. It’s important to hire people that are a great fit with your company. It’s important to give employees guidelines on using social networks and if you feel it’s not clear whether some information should be shared or not, just say it: “Feel free to share this news with your friends!” or “This is confidential information, we’ll let you know when you can share it. Thanks for your understanding!”
  • There’s no value in having employees use social media. Maybe you have a social media team or maybe you don’t see any value at all in social media. If it’s the latter, I would definitely recommend reading Gary Vaynerchuk‘s The Thank You Economy. On the other hand, if you just don’t see what the point of having your employees on social media, it’s time to realize that the new normal of work includes social media.

Missing opportunities

Ultimately, by blocking the access to social networks you’re missing out on great new opportunities. Not doing so demonstrates that you’re open and aware of the changing times, it shows you trust your employees and trust is everything. Besides younger employees won’t accept to work at a company that blocks access to these tools or they’ll access them via their mobile phones.

By actually encouraging employees to use these tools you get to get to have access to each employee’s network. By facilitating the use of social tools, your employees can share corporate information such as contests, job postings, news and updates and even encouraging check-ins with Foursquare, Facebook or Gowalla all your company’s greatness spreads through your employees’ networks. Take Facebook for example, on average people have 130 friends. If you have 500 employees and let’s say roughly 450 have Facebook accounts, that’s access to 65,000 people that see every check-in, read about every news and see job posting. Add to that Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and personal blogs…that’s a lot of employer branding as well as business development and recruitment potential.

Gary Vaynerchuk says in The Thank You Economy(Affiliate link), “you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.” People will always trust their friends more than corporate speak and what better way to spread news and find new employees than be encouraging your current employees to spread the news.

What’s your take on using social media at work?

(Photo credit: Ian Munroe)

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  • Anonymous

    Excellent post, Fabrice. 
    The more I speak with business people who aren’t part of our social media coven, the more I realize that perhaps we take too much for granted.As much as there’s a flood of resources on the web for anyone interested in social media to learn from, the reality is that as soon as you dig any deeper than the very basics, it all becomes overwhelming.Put that together with the lack of time that most managers have and at best you get indifference to integrating social media into their company; at worst, they’ll get their web designer to throw up a Twitter and Facebook account and depend on some junior staff to post content occasionally.I’m talking about SMB’s primarily, but I think this could hold true for larger companies who hire agencies to manage their social media strategy.You use social media to build relationships. To do that, you need to care and empathize with people, only people can do that - companies can’t.  People care about people not organizations.  So if a company really wants to connect with people they should hire social people people who use social media. (Thanks for allowing me an opportunity to draft my next blog post :)

    • http://www.fabricecalando.com Fabrice Calando

      There’s a lot more education to do outside of the fishbowl…slowly but surely.

      Glad I could help! Feel free to link back ;-)

      • Anonymous

        And that seems to be the biggest challenge for us (or me at least). People aren’t used to “slow”. For us, we’re always on to the next new technology or platform, for managers, they’re used to projects with defined time lines.  When they’re told that social media is complicated and will take months before you can see results, they look for a quick alternative i.e. use Twitter and Facebook as digital billboards.

        • http://www.fabricecalando.com Fabrice Calando

          And when it boils down to it, I think the “web” is still a very scary place. Some companies still block access to most of the web, not only social media…

          • Anonymous

            And some of those companies that block social media and other web sites  are very present on social media. i.e TD Bank. I suppose being a bank has something to do with it – but we live in an era of smartphones. There’s no way to stop people from accessing the internet if they really want to – at any time. (Bathroom breaks included.)

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