Deloitte Offers Webcast in Harnessing Social Media while Mitigating the Risks, 12/8, 2 pm EST
Deloitte’s upcoming webcastSocial Media and Government: Managing the Blurred Line between Personal Lives and Official Business discusses how businesses and governments can take advantage of social media while handling the risks of employees using the tools. Registration is free. The event is Tuesday, December 8, at 2 pm EST.
Addenda 12/08/09: The webcast hit on some great points.
Many organizations fear how their employees will behave online because of how it might reflect back on the company, especially in situations where it isn’t absolutely clear whether someone is representing the company or not in their actions. Some organizations already have codes of conduct. These codes might apply to online situations and might just need some review and tweaking in order to apply to social networks. Creating new policies might not be necessary.
When teaching people how to use the tools, organizations should take time to talk about conduct and that people should think of content as being permanent, and that posts might reflect on them as much as they might also be about the organization. Having a dialog about the role an organization’s communications people might play and how regular employees use the tools can be very useful at this stage. It’s better than backtracking later. Social media can blur lines between communication roles within the company and to consumers who is officially speaking for an organization.
Social tools are making some governments thinks slightly differently about the Freedom of Information Act and retention policies. While they might handle certain requests certain ways and have destruction and retention policies, social tools might approach archiving and retrieval differently.
What does it mean if an agency, say, deletes information, but someone can get that information from a site’s archives?
12/15/09: Slides are available, but access might be restricted to people who have registered for talk or require free registration.
