How did this end up?

(Personally I think it is a terrible idea to monitor everything. Set good policies and react to the outliers.)

Just curious.

TO’B

Kind of flies in the face of what makes social networking so successful – an open and sharing network.

Good luck with it and certainly an interesting concern that many companies face.

Otherwise this is arrogant, controlling, foolish and self-defeating. It proceeds from a premise that employees are fundamentally a problem, and it will completely succeed in creating that as the operative reality of the firm.

Advise them to drink the Kool-Aid; then let us know how that works out . . .

I suppose this all came about because of some specific event. I assume it was embarrassing for the company.

I think a better way to handle this is to do facilitated sessions on the issue — the need for privacy of the employees, the growing use of social media, how off handed remarks can cause great damage to the company and to the all the jobs in the company.

Then I would ask for volunteers (seed a few if you must) to form a task group and come up with a social media plan.

The path your proceeding down does not empower employees, seems heavy handed and will destroy moral. Worse, it won’t work.

You client should be aware that in some parts of the world (in my part for instance) monitoring all web use of an employee is illegal and they could face some serious legal battles originating from unions, civil rights organizations etc…

I am currently writing the guidelines for our group of companies and have been involved with this topic since 2005…

From experience I can tell (and have seen some research on the topic) that in about 99% of the time a company with clear social media guidelines does not face any issues whatsoever with employees using these tools…

It all comes down to clearly describing what is common sense and what is over the top… and link the social media guidelines to the business conduct guidelines already in place.

Does your client have a clear email policy ?
A clear telephone policy ?
A well understood snail mail or copy machine policy ?

The best thing to do is to ask the employees of this company what they consider done and not done on the web through social media… List the things they would consider a breach in confidentiality or wrong use of company IT assets and you’ll see, they will cover almost all the restrictions your guidelines would impose..

Your client should trust their employees, they hired them so I would guess they are pretty intelligent and grown up people.

Good luck !

Ask everyone to create a Friedfeed account and syndicate their online activities in one place. ( you can track all their activities in one place). If you like my idea, send me a mail.

Thanks,
Wicky

I think they need to have a little more faith in their employees. The employees, especially sales reps should be sensitive to their clients’ and prospects’ personalities and cultures. A sales rep doesn’t want to lose his/her job or client for a stupid comment online. There are lots of horror stories of being losing jobs and clients from online behavior but these people probably did stupid things in person too. Use this as an opportunity to train their employees in the many positive and business-friendly aspects of social media. Teach them the best ways to use the different tools (Twitter, Facebook, LInkedIn, Flickr, blogs, etc.)

Also using a quick Google and/or Twitter search our client may find many of their clients online using social media very effectively. Here’s a presentation on the extent Fortune 100 companies are using social media. http://www.slideshare.net/guest338fbe/b-m-social-media-fortune-100?from=email&type=share_slideshow&subtype=slideshow_thumb

Good luck. I don’t think your client will be successful in holding back the tide of business and social media.

Making employees aware of the concerns and bringing them on the team so that they’re conscious of the possible ramifications on their livelihood would be a good start.

As an example – I follow a couple of the Zappos execs on Twitter. They tweet A LOT about partying and drinking and carrying on. It’s not my thing, and I’m pretty sure that Tony Hsiu and I would not be great friends in real life. But as it happens, I was aware of Zappos before I started following them on twitter, and had bought lots of shoes online from a few different vendors, but not them. I didn’t make my first Zappos purchase until after I was following them on Twitter. I appreciate their company philosophy of transparency, and the way they treat their employees. I overlooked the unsavory drunkenness of their executives and made a purchase. Anecdotal sample of one, and all that, but worth considering, I think.

Why not just set up some common sense policies around what is appropriate to to Tweet so that if these important accounts are watching his feed, they might get some insight into what he does outside of the office, without anything offensive?

I’d hope as their consultant you’ve explained that this perception doesn’t need to be a reality “in which case they think their time will be spent apologizing to multi-million dollar clients they have lost that their sales rep was on personal time when they tweeted some off-color tweet.”

In general I’ve found the most successful business Twitter accounts are the ones that also personalize the person behind it. You won’t get as much interest if you cut out the personal commentary. What kind of off color comments are we talking about here?