What’s Your Policy? | Strategic Guru, Inc.

Without social media guidelines, is your company at risk?

With so much focus on Toyota and Tiger, it’s easy to become a spectator of crisis PR. But do you know what your organization would do if damaging information got out to the internet? Without social media guidelines, you may be at risk.

Domino’s Pizza learned a valuable lesson in 2009. After two employees posted a video of themselves on YouTube defacing a pizza, Domino’s responded with a video of its own within 24 hours. CEO David Brandon outlined the steps the company would take to ensure the incident wouldn’t happen again and just may have saved the company’s brand reputation. Toyota and Tiger should have been watching.

The lesson is simple:

Implementing a policy that guides employees’ use of blogs and social networks can protect against damage to your company’s reputation.

The fact is conversations in the blogosphere are largely uncontrollable. You can’t stop a viral discussion on Facebook or YouTube. Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, the struggle to strike the right balance between the social and personal nature of these tools requires maintaining some degree of corporate oversight.

The challenge is to figure out how to get into the conversation and guide it, not attempt to control it. Companies that find out how to embrace social media and use it to their advantage are making great headway. Intel is a great example, offering rules of engagement in its Social Media Guidelines.

Want to learn more?

Read our latest blog post for 3 tips on reputation management.

Your Journey Begins But With One Click: Strategic Guru

February 2010