To be or not to be... social?

Although social media are the talk of the town in business communication, only one out of five companies world wide has a formal policy concerning them. This is what I read today in an article on managersonline.nl. The data were the outcome of an international study conducted by Manpower.

Negative aspects of social media mentioned in the article included a loss of productivity by employees who use social media for personal purposes and potential information leakage. However, they do also have benefits: building up relationships with customers, cooperation between different division and possibilities for innovation, to mention a few. Research conducted by Weber Shandwick showed that 73% of the companies which are listed in the Fortune 100 had a Twitter account, but that only a quarter of them tweets regularly. The original source, express.be explains that 52% of them barely show any activity, according to their numbers of links, references and reactions. Half of the companies involved have less than 500 followers.

Policy or no policy, I think social media should not be ignored. Of course, it can be a deliberate choice not to use Twitter et al, but in my opinion every modern company should at least take the power of social media into consideration. And it's better to be prepared than to be taken by storm. In the case of the article, I think it is clear that the benefits definitely outweigh the downsides, especially when a good policy is drawn up and lived up to by employees. This also includes the regularity of updating and monitoring, because a neglected profile is probably even worse than not having one at all. Social media offer companies such a large number of strategic possibilities (which I will write about on this blog), it would be a shame to let that go to waste.