Although this might sound elementary, once the firm
has decided to utilize Social Media applications, it is
worth checking that all employees may actually
access them. Commonly, firms block Facebook,
YouTube, and Second Life on corporate PCs for fear
that staff might spend too much time networking
instead of working. While this is certainly a consideration,
it cannot imply that employees must have
special permission to be able to access the company
blog. At the same time, there is a need to curtail the
possibility of the entire organization spending all its
time producing funny videos and uploading them to
YouTube. One possible approach involves defining
groups of employees whose primary objective is the
management of corporate Social Media; all other
staff members are treated as occasional participants.
Under this scenario, the first group is given
administrator rights–—which allows the opening of
new discussion threads and deletion of inappropriate
posts–—while the second group is not. Also, at
some point, it will be necessary to develop certain
guidelines for Social Media usage; as done, for
instance, by ‘‘Big Blue’’ IBM, which has a corporate
charta for appropriate behavior within Second Life.
For example, it is important to highlight that every
employee needs to identify himself or herself as
such when posting a comment on the corporate
blog. Otherwise, end-consumers could get the
impression that anonymous accounts are used to
enable employees to post fake messages and overly-
positive feedback, which could severely damage
the credibility of your whole Social Media campaign.