CHAPTER 7
Human Resources: Strategy & Collaboration

Whether employees use social media platforms for personal or professional reasons, or both, the key value of social media usage is that humans are communicating with and paying attention to each other. But who’s looking out for the affects social media communications can have on the company? From an organization’s perspective, securing social media starts with a closer look at the human resource strategy for employee communications and collaboration using these new media tools and technologies. Human Resources manages this overall strategy for the organization, along with driving and enforcing the social media security policy with the assistance of the IT department.

The first step to securing social media is to create the social media policies, as outlined in the previous chapter. In this chapter, we review the next step: the critical role Human Resources has to play in securing social media. A human resource strategy is essential to creating procedures needed to link social media policy to existing business processes across departments, including Information Technology, Customer Service, Product Development, Legal, and Marketing. Unifying your security practices with other departments requires creating a chain of custody for remediating policy violations.

The social media policy addresses two types of employees: the Community Manager—whose job it is to participate actively on a daily basis on social networks by listening to and engaging with customers, clients, and consumers in general—and the remaining employees—who primarily use social media for personal reasons or with specific professional objectives, such as one-to-one business sales, or who should not be allowed to use social media at work but still participate. Human Resources (HR) should play a key role in identifying or recruiting personnel for the Community Manager position. HR also ensures that all existing employees and new hires have signed onto and are kept up to date with the company’s evolving social media policies, by implementing social media monitoring practices and controls in conjunction with the IT and Legal departments. Human Resources is also responsible for keeping a chain of custody, cataloguing policy violations for immediate remediation when necessary.

This chapter discusses the key challenges Human Resources needs to address:

Identifying the necessary business processes, regulations, and legal restrictions regarding social media usage.

Defining and implementing the role of the Community Manager and enabling coordination across departments.

Training the Community Manager and employees in appropriate social media usage.

We also examine the Community Manager’s role in small, medium, and large companies.