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Social Media Is Not A Back Channel

By ⋅ January 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
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Peter Shankman has a great story about an agency guy that tweets about his distaste for Memphis while visiting FedEx to do some social media training. Oops. He got busted big time.

People have a tendency to get comfortable social media. Too comfortable. There’s no shortage of examples where people post incriminating photo’s on their Facebook or MySpace pages.  This is a problem that’s only going to get worse.

Like many HPers, I first joined Yammer after they won TechCrunch50. I was first excited about the product (and I think it has a lot of potential) but for me I didn’t find much to post there that I wouldn’t post on Twitter. I think it has potential for two reasons:

  • Some employees like the idea of Twitter but don’t want something so much out in the open
  • There are things you may want to say to employees that you wouldn’t say on Twitter

TechCruch reports that Yammer has just raised it’s first round of funding. Yammer Raises $5 Million For Workgroup Micro-Messaging. So other people obviously feel it has potential as well.  Yammer has a nice business model. It’s free to any employee with a company email. If  you want to control this group, say exclude people who have left the company since signing up, or brand your companies page, there’s a per user fee. This is great for small businesses who want a company wide back channel, this doesn’t make sense for large enterprise customers. I haven’t checked recently but I’m sure that if they don’t know, at some point they’ll offer enterprise licensing.

In last week’s core community group the issue of Yammer came up. (I’ve mentioned our core community group before and written about it on my HP blog.) The question was basically “What do we do about this?” It’s a very valid question. The Yammer community is kind of a HP community, but no one at HP gave them permission. The concern is that employees will
treat this like an official HP communication channel. Or just get a little too comfortable with it and start saying too much.

HP has an official policy in our standards of business conduct which applies to all company communication, to paraphrase: you don’t share privilaged information through non secure channels. This means you don’t send email to the wrong people, you don’t talk about certain things outside of work, etc.

I quickly made the point that Yammer is no different than Ning, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups or anyother employee group, of which there are many. Anyone could star a group for employees and people do. The thing to remember is that these are not official and secure channels.

We will see a time where someone screws this up. Hopefully not at HP but someone at some company will. We’re not perfect. Just like people say the wrong things in email and to the wrong reporter, people make mistakes.

I’m proud to say that the group at HP didn’t freak out and didn’t try and shut it down. Instead we decided to make sure that our business conduct standards are emphasized and updated to explicitly include social media platforms.

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About Tac

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.

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  • http://www.reputationtorevenue.com Rob Leavitt

    The rebalancing continues! Sounds like you took the right approach with the core community group. There really are no more back channels; we should always be ready for anything we say to end up plastered just about anywhere, so need be more careful in what we say in any channel. At the same time, companies need to accept much more transparency than most of the would like. We’re all moving toward a new equilibrium as the lines between personal and professional, work and home, and “secure” and non-secure channels continue to blur.

  • http://www.reputationtorevenue.com Rob Leavitt

    The rebalancing continues! Sounds like you took the right approach with the core community group. There really are no more back channels; we should always be ready for anything we say to end up plastered just about anywhere, so need be more careful in what we say in any channel. At the same time, companies need to accept much more transparency than most of the would like. We’re all moving toward a new equilibrium as the lines between personal and professional, work and home, and “secure” and non-secure channels continue to blur.

  • Aaron

    I think enterprise ‘microblogging’ tools like Yammer have a big future inside organizations of all sizes. Especially as usage of Twitter grows and more people start to understand the concept of ‘microblogging’.

    However, there are a number of barriers that will prevent widespread adoption…..

    - security. employees won’t post updates unless they have confidence that their updates are secure and not a violation of company policy

    - lack of participation. widespread adoption won’t happen until smaller groups of employees start utilizing the tool. without participation from my project team/workgroup, I don’t have a lot to post about. if they were participating, I would have tons of ‘microblogging’ updates to share

    - corporate culture. there are just certain corporate cultures that won’t embrace ‘microblogging’ as fast as other types of corporate cultures.

  • Aaron

    I think enterprise ‘microblogging’ tools like Yammer have a big future inside organizations of all sizes. Especially as usage of Twitter grows and more people start to understand the concept of ‘microblogging’.

    However, there are a number of barriers that will prevent widespread adoption…..

    - security. employees won’t post updates unless they have confidence that their updates are secure and not a violation of company policy

    - lack of participation. widespread adoption won’t happen until smaller groups of employees start utilizing the tool. without participation from my project team/workgroup, I don’t have a lot to post about. if they were participating, I would have tons of ‘microblogging’ updates to share

    - corporate culture. there are just certain corporate cultures that won’t embrace ‘microblogging’ as fast as other types of corporate cultures.

  • http://idahopublicrelations.wordpress.com Jess Flynn

    Amen Tac! Some PR peers and I have been talking/debating a lot about this and the whole personal/professional online personality - and trying to figure out where the line is to share your opinions and thoughts while being cognizant of how you are the face of a company. You can’t lose your true voice and still have credibility - but you must be thinking constantly of how your words reflect on you as a professional.

  • http://idahopublicrelations.wordpress.com Jess Flynn

    Amen Tac! Some PR peers and I have been talking/debating a lot about this and the whole personal/professional online personality - and trying to figure out where the line is to share your opinions and thoughts while being cognizant of how you are the face of a company. You can’t lose your true voice and still have credibility - but you must be thinking constantly of how your words reflect on you as a professional.

  • http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/online-pr-agency-services Roger, Online PR Agency, C&

    I’d say the golden rule is think about how your public Twitter page looks to the average visitor and figure out from there if you’re saying the right things.

    From a comms perspective you’re probably using Twitter to connect to strangers… If you’re using it purely for a closed network, then you ought ot be using IM or Yammer or wotnot, and your public page is going to be very dull indeed for anyone else.

    If you’re using it to say interesting things that make strangers want to follow you then you’re probably on the right path (assuming you’re not ranting like an idiot!). Being ‘interesting’ in this respect will probably mean Tweeting appropriate things - and not secrets, flames, outbursts, etc….

    Alternatively, if you want to use Twitter to vent your spleen then it carries a health warning - there’s a very definite PR downside, as the Edelman / Memphis example shows….

  • http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/online-pr-agency-services Roger, Online PR Agency, C&M

    I’d say the golden rule is think about how your public Twitter page looks to the average visitor and figure out from there if you’re saying the right things.

    From a comms perspective you’re probably using Twitter to connect to strangers… If you’re using it purely for a closed network, then you ought ot be using IM or Yammer or wotnot, and your public page is going to be very dull indeed for anyone else.

    If you’re using it to say interesting things that make strangers want to follow you then you’re probably on the right path (assuming you’re not ranting like an idiot!). Being ‘interesting’ in this respect will probably mean Tweeting appropriate things - and not secrets, flames, outbursts, etc….

    Alternatively, if you want to use Twitter to vent your spleen then it carries a health warning - there’s a very definite PR downside, as the Edelman / Memphis example shows….

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