Social Networking Bashing your Company
Social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube are virtually unavoidable today, when it sometimes seems that everyone you know is on some networking site. Already there are many news stories out about companies running Google searches on potential applicants – and not hiring those applicants with unsavory MySpace pages.
Even if your company’s official Web 2.0 presence is perfectly respectable, though, there are many ways that social networking sites could be damaging your business reputation:
- Employees and team members may have unsavory pages on social networking sites – and may be identifying themselves with your company.
- Customers and even competitors may be posting criticism and harmful comments about your business online.
Of course, everyone has the right to express themselves as they like – our Founding Fathers fought hard for freedom of speech – but what happens when that expression is used to put down the business you have spent years building?
Social networking can be a bit of a nightmare, since any pages can be seen by thousands of people in minutes. For example, if your financial department has a MySpace page showing members of your company drinking beer (or worse) that page will be seen by every “friend” linked to that page – and by every friend of every friend. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see that those images – which can portray your workplace in a less-than-flattering light – can make their way halfway around the world and back again before you are even aware of their existence.
The first step to halting the problem is to become aware of it. Take a look online to see what search results come up when you Google your company name. Consider hiring a company that can unearth all the search results. Next, call in your team members to talk about social networking. Avoid a confrontational tone, but let employees know that things they may have wanted to keep private may be affecting how they are seen professionally. Encourage your employees to set their settings to “private” on personal social networking sites. This ensures that only invited friends can see these pages.
Encourage your team members to put together professional pages on sites such as LinkedIn. This can help your employees bolster their own professional prospects while helping your company name appear in a more flattering light. You may even wish to have your team members assemble a few social networking pages – on Facebook and MySpace, even – for the company as a whole. This can be a great way to project a professional but slightly more relaxed image of your company. It can also be a great place to counter some of the criticisms that may be lurking out there in cyberspace, aimed at your business. Belonging to social networking sites even allows you to contact those people who post unflattering comments about your company. You can use the opportunity to ask these unhappy customers how your business can make things right.