Social Media: Social Media In The Workplace

Social Media has been a revelation for social interaction among friends, family and most importantly business. I remember when I was an employee and Facebook had just been launched and everyone in the business had a Facebook account, and it was regarded company's number one enemy. The company used the social media as their scapegoat as the reason of the employees not being efficient at their work. They blamed Facebook for the non-profitability of the company and the more they cursed and ridiculed it, we fell more and more in love with it. The company finally drew up an internet policy and enforced it by cutting off access to the social network Facebook. This, in my view was the grandest mistake they did that year. 

There were obvious benefits for employees to use social media then and the benefits still obvious today. Instead of blaming social media for the flaws of your business process, use it to share and engage your audience and your employees similarly. A study showed that when a business is transparent about their dealing with issues related to customers, the customer is more likely to turn to be loyal customers. So, which is the best platform to share your challenges with customers, not considering social media as a tool. There is none that is as cheap, in fact social media is free and none that will give you better results. 

Social Media is meant to make your business social, and therefore you engage with your audience on a social level. Yes, one does focus on the profitability, and social media has shown to be profitable. I consulted with one of the clients, and he was complaining to me about how much social media is costing his internet usage, and further like my previous employers blamed social media for the inefficiency of the company. Having heard this before, I decided to do proper research, to cut a long story short, their inefficiency had nothing to do with social media, the majority of the employees' performance was acceptable, and we found other factors like lack of technology that caused their slow turn around times. 

Enlyne Branding set out to find a solution and we found it, and our findings were rather interesting, we found that internet usage was due to the increase in their staff and also their CRM system no longer met their requirements. Part of the solution I insisted that they should have daily tasks that all of the employees would post or tweet something about the company on the company page and similarly post the same post on their statuses. Off course there was resistance, but I had a plan, the company was an IT company, and instead of being on the social networks and updating your status just for yourself, I requested that everybody first must like the business page and further each and every one of them, the whole 210 of them, must respond on status posted on the page, three times a day on three statuses. 

At first it was not well received, but what this did for the company, each time there was a problem, there were able to resolve the problem faster and with better meaningful solutions. Therefore the solution that the employees posted or a suggestion actually added value to the customer, and the customer who followed the business page on Facebook appreciated seeing this team work and started enforcing his employees to follow the service provider on business page on Facebook. And together clients and service providers shared valuable insights, but most importantly started using social media as a quick solution generating tool. There were other things that were shared as well, like clients year end party functions videos, training pictures, interviews with some of the client stake holders and in this platform anything was acceptable within the boundaries of professionalism. 

Today, my client doubled his internet usage and he is not complaining because he has actually quadrupled his income, just by posting two to three posts a day, five days a week and each and every employee responding on the post with valuable insight of the daily experiences of their desk. He is able to use Facebook as an overview assessment tool to determine which area of his business he must focus on. He says, "I see some employees posting negative feedback, and I am able to address it immediately," and sometimes other employees encourage and support other employees through the social media tool, Facebook. 

So what is the moral of the story. The moral of this story is that we as marketers are viewing social networks as gateways for customers to engage, and businesses should learn not to scorn social networks, but view them as tools that differentiate the brand from their competition. Social media also has some internal benefits that could assist to improve things like team work and sharing and these benefits are often ignored. So my challenge is, instead of blocking the social network platform from your employees, make it part of their daily operational process and success, social networks are already on smart phones, ipad and other communication gadgets, use it creatively and you will see continuous success and enjoy continuous interactions between the heart of your business (employees) and the customers. As for my previous employers, they never did recover, in fact they retrenched a year and a half later, and still wondering today what caused their dip.