Tracking Employee Usage

As social media matures and gains wider adoption by the world’s population online, employees will come to terms with the fact that their activities are being monitored while at work. In most cases, it is not possible to use social media all day and remain productive at work. There are exceptions to this rule, however:

You are a Community Manager or Customer Service Representative responding to and engaging with your community of customers and fans.

You are an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professional trying to backlink to content legitimately as well as increase the page rank of Twitter profiles through quality posts.

You are running promotions like @delloutlet and Dell’s whole family of Twitter accounts (http://www.dell.com/twitter).

You are conducting research for your work or for a story you’re working on and gleaning new information from the responses.

You are following a relevant set of professionals in your domain whose posts are adding to your level of knowledge and awareness of your industry by keeping you on the leading edge.

You are developing business for the company by increasing your authority through relevant and useful posts, mixed with relationship building online.

You are periodically taking a break from work and are getting “connected” and motivated by engaging with others online, especially if you’re working alone from a home office.

There may be other cases, but generally speaking, most people find that too much time spent on social networks throughout the day drains their productivity and they will accept that their employers monitor for such activity.

Benefits of Tracking Employee Usage

Earlier in the chapter, we mentioned some of the key activities you can track with a log management system. If you begin to track these actions, when do you really want to report on that activity? And why would you need to report on employees’ social media activity? The key reasons are really first, good business practices, and second, regulatory requirements.

As we have seen through Dell’s positive example, real revenues from social media are possible, and the ability to understand what both your employees are saying in addition to customers is critical. One of the great potential threats is employees time wasting. If you do not track how much time your employees are spending on social media sites, you might lose real dollars in wasted hourly salaries. Employees can communicate over social media with you and about you, so knowing what they are saying may help you improve your business, train employees better, and impact how employees work.

The regulatory requirements of tracking employees cross just about all industries. Privacy laws will expand and crackdowns begin on what companies are doing with customer data. Employees are a major source of breaking regulations. We have mentioned several cases throughout the book on the dangers of sending out a tweet or a picture of a customer, especially in the healthcare industry. As we mentioned previously, the SEC rules on social media use will have a wide ranging impact in the financial industry. Employees have to be tracked to ensure your compliance to regulations.

Dissemination of Policy Changes

Social media policies will change over time as new types of social platforms come into existence and as existing ones change in functionality. These changes may take time to develop and to implement throughout the organization with new procedures and monitoring tools. However, any new policies and procedures should be widely communicated when they are updated: not only is this the correct ethical stance for a corporation, but also communicating about social media policies acts as a deterrent to misbehavior in itself. Some companies have even taken the additional step of making their social media policies available to the public at large, so that everyone, including employees and customers, understands the company’s position and values regarding social media.

Following the Social Media News

The social web is a quickly evolving ecosystem of websites, applications, cases studies in success and failure, personalities, and other types of events, situations, and incidents. Every week notable happenings occur in the social media environment that are instructive and that merit attention. There are numerous resources to follow to keep informed about social media. We find that we can stay on top of most of it by following five of the most recognized social media and technology publications online, including:

TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/)

Mashable (www.mashable.com)

ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com)

GigaOM (www.gigaom.com)

TechMeme (www.techmeme.com)

Keeping abreast of social media industry news is as easy as spending 10 to 15 minutes a day browsing through the new headlines and articles of social media blogs. Very quickly you will be considered your company’s foremost resource on social media, an enviable and valuable position!