Thursday, July 21, 2011

Social Media and Work Policy

I have a conference call next week with corporate HR where we are going to discuss writing a company policy regarding social media. Obviously from an HR standpoint there ares some concerns about employees spending work time on social media sites, but also there is issue about how much can your employer intrude into your personal life. There has already been some litigation in cases where employees have posted items about their work environment and been fired, only to have the courts rule in favor of the employee.
In the publishing business, there is another set of issues surrounding what gets posted by journalists and how journalists source materials - many are using social media sites to gather background on story subjects.

Anyway, if you would like to offer your ideas about what a social media policy should look like at work, please respond to this blog or e-mail me at marnold@chronicleonline.com. I may use your thoughts as input in my conference call.

2 comments:

  1. My last employer had a social media policy: it was pretty vague and not really that useful. Trying to define or limit what people can say, how, when, and where is a tricky line to balance. I have recently seen several articles from Mashable about social media policy, this is a good one to start with: http://mashable.com/2011/05/02/social-media-policy-tips/.
    Good luck, and let us know how the project progresses!
    ljb

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  2. This is a very interesting post and LOVE it. Take Facebook for example, my best friend from Kansas told me once that she would never friend her colleagues on Facebook due to privacy issue, she did sometime post some negative things about her work. Later on, she told me that she had to add more colleagues on Facebook since she can't refuse them more, after that, she stopped updating Facebook. LOL. Another example is: a girl posted negative comment regard her boss in her own language on Facebook, she felt good until one of her friends said "don't you worry about your boss may use Google translator to get what you said about him"?

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