Ideas – what to do about these pesky things. What if they point out a failure or shortcoming of the company? Not as big of a concern is ideas that would compliment and build on a culture or system that is working great. Control by legal, marketing or communications are usually some of the bigger hurdles that come up when we are roadmapping and visioning social applications for companies. But that is in the beginning. But once these stakeholders are given the kool-aid of social and know that these applications don’t get deployed without some considerable thought around roles, responsibilities and governance.
It is always better to have ideas or comments that don’t necessarily foot with the line of marketing or communications teams when everything is within the firewalls – and legal has better control over the content and such. But what happens when your social application is internal and external facing? I say even better. There certainly needs to be more training and consideration given to enabling employees about social software. When you are within the company, an employee’s role is different that when they are on facebook or twitter or Google+. Companies usually have governance around what employees can and can’t do on those with respect to if they are acting on behalf of the company or even if comments are made and could be constued to be acting on behalf. We have all seen twitter account go awry! Offerings like Jive and Telligent have some really great features that help manage internal and external social networks co-exist while you have robust internal social software packages like IBM Connections that build our powerful internal networks – to the point where often times it is considered to replace intranets.
So don’t be afraid of what people have to say. Have defined roles, expectations and a well communicated governance policy and many of your worries will never see the light of day. And when it gets down to it, these tools have little power and affects than voicemail, email and other communication tools.
