Acting as both H.R. AND P.R.

Do your employees and co-workers use social media? Of course!

Can what is said online hurt your company’s reputation? Of course!

Important Reasons Why I Need A Social Media Policy:

• It is not always understood what is appropriate to be posted about the workplace.
• Cliques carry over into the digital realm.
• Harmful statements about coworkers, managers, customers, and owners can become viral and your business’s reputation will beat risk.

What Else Do I Need To Be Aware Of?

Outside of Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, and Ello there are websites that directly feature rating your employer. Websites like Glassdoor and Careerbliss even allow applicants to post reviews about their experience interviewing with your company. While talking about your salary to a coworker may still be a workplace faux pas, current and former employees are sharing their job titles and salary information as well on these platforms.

What Can I Do As A Form Of Damage Control?

1. Take your exit interview process seriously. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s family, and sometimes it’s the commute. But if the reason for an employee’s resignation is due to changeable factors, you should take this information and try to act on it.

2. Keep your finger on the pulse of the morale of your organization. Just like unhappy customers are more likely to lash out online, so may your employees. Consider reviews of management from the people who work for them. Establish communication through comment boxes and surveys. This information should be shared on your website as a way to display how happy your employees are to work for you.

3. All businesses can use Google’s Alerts as a tool to manage public information about the inner workings and general statements about the workplace. Keep the searches simple, check your results at least weekly. You may be surprised what shows up.

4. Keep an eye on the listings for your organization on the employer review sites. See if something especially harmful to your company’s reputation, or proprietary information being leaked. Be sure to alert the hosting website if the Terms of Use are not followed. These sites do have Rules of Conduct for users who post there.

At the end of the day, every employee is responsible for the public image of your organization. Whether it is helping a customer in person, writing a post about work on their blog, or answering the phone; what we say and how we say it has a ripple effect and can affect the image of the organization. You can’t always make everybody happy all the time. Just be sure you have your eyes and ears open and are using the tools available to you to manage the chatter about your biz.