Know Idea: Social Awareness

Businesses are working to bring back employees; it's a great time to review handbooks and revise or establish social media policies. As current events have shown, unguided or irresponsible social media usage can have vast ramifications for your business if you don't have social media policies.

Most people have at least one social media account; businesses need to have a policy that ensures employees have guidance as to the company's expectations of their online behaviors. 

Social Media Guidelines can be your business's first defense in mitigating risk for both you and your reputation. Your social media policy can:
​

• Provide your employees with guidelines for communicating social media platforms with a clear statement of expectations of what is deemed right and wrong and the possible consequences of posting hateful, defamatory, harassing, threatening, discriminatory or hateful content to or about another person, group or entity.
• Provide clarity around your values and culture for customers, employees, and the public.
• Set expectations to be proactive and prevent issues instead of depending on crisis response.
• Reduce legal exposure and risk.

​Providing clear expectations and guidelines to your employees, you can help ensure that comments placed online by an employee do not inadvertently damage your brand and your reputation.