The Society for Management and Internet conducted a closed internet poll amongst executives working out of Vienna. Whilst there is no scientific claim, still interesting trends showed up:
Personal usage of Web 2.0 tools (77%) and usage for the company (44%) is high:
When the participants were asked about positive or negative effects, the two sides of the same coin came up frequently. The coin is ‘information’!
Half of the participants are seeing the Web and Social Media as a pool of information they need, other half is feeling overwhelmed by the information flow. For both parties we would like to recommend a conference dedicated to the topic.
When asked to give specific examples about the effects, the participants told us:
- Positive effects in collaborating with Retailers and Distributors. Quick information about new products and benefits from online B2B order systems. Other executive mentioned his increase in professional contacts and ease of contact acquisition, which is vital to his business
- Negative examples coming from mainly two fields: potential employee inefficiency (wasting time in social media) and the threat to get negative user comments on the company (bashing).
Example of recent Nestlé bashing and backgrounds: The Wall Street Journal
The Society also asked the pool of executives, whether or not the Web 2.0 influenced the organizational set-up: 33% of the participants replied yes, they adopted their companies in on or the other way to cope with the web impact. There is no clear pattern of who is driving the change. Quoted change agents are: Agencies, global HQs, the Management, Marketing, Corporate Communications and IT department. Outside help was used from: Agencies, external consultant and (thx!) the Society for Management and Internet. Significant number of replies (27%) indicated that they worked through the change without external help.
As an unexpected and alarming outcome of the poll we identified only 17% of companies are executing a corporate social guideline or similar code of conduct in the digital realm.
Strong recommendation by the Society is to develop and enforce a social media guideline to ensure that the company is communicated correctly in the digital public.
Employees posting, commenting and quoting about their employer is a phenomenon as old as companies are existing: Colleagues talking about their company with spouses or in bars or elsewhere. The difference in social media is that the message is transported globally to literally everybody.
The upside of having a good social media guideline is that you can gain as many ambassadors and evangelist for your products and services as you have employee who are engaged in social media.
Corner-stones of a good social media guideline:
- Making employees aware of the power they have in hands, for the good and the bad
- Asking them to engage in the web, but to disclose that they are employed with the respective company and their quotes are their personal point of view
- Company monitoring the web for employees posts and internally acting openly and positively if it goes into the wrong way
- Company having a process how to deal with negative external comments according to the social media netiquette (open, corrective, moderative, acknowledging and respecting others)
The Society is looking forward to discuss any of the mentioned topics in detail, just send an email to office@somain.org or the Author.
Happy days!
