How is your firm going to implement its social media policy?

 

You have your social media policy. Tick. 

Worked out yet how to implement it?

This is the challenge which is raised at most training events I run.

How do you actually implement it without stepping on your staff's personal privacy?

It's one thing to strongly recommend that staff do not post stuff on facebook when drunk, but another to be able to monitor this and then take action. After all if the member of staff is not connected to any clients or potential clients on facebook, then what does it matter if they post up a status when drunk? But, how do you as a firm know they are not connected to any clients on facebook?

You could just ban your staff from being connected to clients of the firm on facebook. But this is shortsighted. After all, you actually encourage employees to recommend the firm's services to their family and friends. You can't then tell them that because their mother is now a client of the firm that they have to unfriend them on facebook.

It's easier to monitor what's being said and talked about in public forums such as Twitter. Although, if you have a big firm, it becomes an impossible job to monitor what every fee earner is saying online in a professional or personal capacity.

The best course of action is to educate your staff on personal branding, social media and how to protect themselves and their future career prospects by what they post on facebook and other social networking sites.

How far would you go to protect your firm's brand online?

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Marcus West's picture

Social Media Policy

Marcus West | | Permalink

Google+ offers more granulated controls than Facebook.

You can create your groups and post your messages selectively.

So for instance you might have three groups

1) Mates

2) Family

3) Business Colleagues

If you want to post a picture of yourself in a gutter somewhere, then you obviously post it to mates only.

Social Media is changing fast though...largely because of smartphones.

Android, which is Google's Smartphone OS, favours the take-up of Google services.

Which partly contributes to the meteoric rise of Google +.....but Google + is also a fantastic business blogging platform. ( I prefer it as business platform to a social platform)

I suspect for social sharing, don't be surprised to see the rise of competitors to facebook.

Path is fantastic little App that allows you to share you day to day life / journal with up to 150 people, in private, lol, without risk of losing your job,....I can see something like this becoming the social app of choice, maybe even, shock horror, eclipsing a giant like Facebook.

 

Tracking Social Media Usage

bowerm | | Permalink

There are a new breed of tools that are starting to emerge, such as CubeSocial (http://cubesocial.com), that help in this regard. [Disclosure: I'm the CTO of CubeSocial.]

These tools help with the compliance problems Heather mentions.  We help by automatically logging all the conversations your staff are having on social media and providing a full archive of that data. In the near future we'll be adding capabilities to route posts through an approval process & apply whitelists and blacklists as presrcibed by each company.

If anyone would like to talk to me about what kinds of compliance capabilities they would like to see in a social media management tool for accountants please get in touch: mark at cubesocial dot com.

efficiencycoach's picture

social media and smartphones

efficiencycoach | | Permalink

Thanks Marcus for your interesting and valuable thoughts. I see smartphones changing both the use of social media and the web as a result. I use social media as one of my main traffic drivers to my website and so now see about 30-40% of my website traffic coming from a smartphone. So hot on my list of things to get right for 2012 is a decent mobile version of my website which still is able to convert visitors.

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I help professionals and firms become the Go-To-Expert. Unusually for someone with an Engineering Degree, I accidentally became a writer and used my knowledge on social media to write the current best-selling and award-winning book on networking, The FT Guide To Business Networking. (75 five star reviews on Amazon - and read the 1st chapter for free here) People frequently talk about me as someone who really knows her stuff – which may be the reason I have, over the last decade, worked with over 300 partners, coached and trained over 1000 professionals at every level of the UK’s most ambitious professional practices. After nearly 5 years for working for BDO LLP, I realised I loved the intellectual challenge of working with accountants, so made working with accountants (and lawyers as I am a glutton for punishment) my sector specialism.

I was honoured to be a judge at the British Accountancy Awards in 2011 and 2012, plus I am a member of the Accountant's Club Global Advisory Panel.

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I adore writing, (as well as helping others achieve their business goals without selling their soul) which is why I blog regularly at Partnership PotentialJoined Up NetworkingHow to make partner and still have a life and venture-Now