Pub. 1 2019-20 Issue 2

http://wvcar.com 16 WVADA representatives of your business. To help them do that, teach employees how to build the company brand and drive traf- fic to the company’s website. Provide a way for people to get approval in advance if they want to say something or write something. Having a process in place ahead of time establishes respon- sibility in an appropriate way. That way, the company’s leaders will have an op- portunity to weigh in on anything that requires some delicacy or precision in how it is said, but it also gives employees a path for being creative and proactive without getting slapped for doing some- thing new. No post should include proprietary in- formation. What’s proprietary? The in- formation they gained from meetings or brainstorm sessions; information about prototypes; new products, including photos; photos of cash receipts, or pho- tos of the cash register POS system. If you don’t want an employee to take and post pictures of your headquarters or any specific rooms within your busi- ness, say so. Remind them that they each have a pro- fessional brand and that they need to be careful about how they represent them- selves. Can you forbid them from posting on their channels? No. You don’t have the legal authority to do that as long as they stay within that channel’s rules. How- ever, you can be plain with them about the legal liability they might expose the company to, and also the possible conse- quences of how other people see them; brands are intangible but powerful, and once someone trashes a brand, the dam- age can be permanent. You can also tell them that their brand contributes to the company brand and that if they talk about the business in unacceptable ways, they could lose their job. For example, the company can fire them for disclos- ing sensitive information, breaching their contract, or defaming either the compa- ny or a competitor. Negative comments attract other nega- tive comments. As a result, employees should not post negative comments about the workplace, even if the com- ment is general and only mildly nega- tive. (Make sure that if you close down the option of a public complaint, you provide some other way for them to work out problems. People do need an effective way to solve problems.) Employees should have appropriate pri- vacy settings. LinkedIn and Twitter are both open. Facebook and Instagram can be made private. Employees need to know how private or open their ac- counts are, and be especially conscious of posting anything on an account that isn’t private. The company has a responsibility to monitor social media accounts at least passively. You can also encourage peo- ple to report threatening language. The point is not about monitoring every- thing employees do. Nobody wants to work for a company that does that. In- stead, it’s about putting in the minimum amount of effort to find big problems early. Toward that end, there’s nothing wrong with using a tool that allows you to “listen” to social media. You can also search periodically for brand names on Instagram and Twitter. The corporate social media policy has additional requirements you might want to add: Limit the number of people who have ac- cess to the company’s social media plat- forms. Change the passwords frequently. When an employee leaves the company, especially if the circumstances are neg- ative, delete that person’s access to the company’s social media channels, and reset everyone’s social media passwords. By educating employees about what they can and cannot say online, you accom- plish two goals. You increase your com- pany’s positive publicity, and you prevent as much negative publicity as possible. That’s a great outcome for everyone involved. t