Your business is involved with social media whether you like it or not, because your employees are using it. Like most of North America, they’re using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even email to stay connected with each other, forming a massive, complex and growing network.

All this social media activity can impact your business even if you don’t allow them to access it at work.  An employee at home venting on Facebook about a lousy day on the job can put your business in a bad light.

In extreme cases, bad employees can pull bone-headed moves like the infamous Dominos video . Other times, they’re just not aware of who might be reading their tweets.

While negatives are newsworthy, there’s also a lot of good that can be done through employee social media use. Positive people with lots of good news to share or people who really care spread positive worth of mouth and make customers feel good about dealing with your business. Employees might also have critical contacts you’d love to know about.

So, do you want to know your employee networks? Yes.

Do you have any right to know? No.

Demanding to know your employee’s social media network is like demanding to be introduced to their family or friends. It’s creepy and intrusive.

Can you get access to these networks anyway? Probably, if you ask nicely.

Providing incentives to employees to help your social media efforts might work better – and I don’t mean bribing them to see their friends list or Twitter followers. For example, some sort of reward for tips on people to follow on Twitter. Just don’t pay people to spout out false praise or marketing slogans. (It defeats the purpose of social media… and it will be obvious)

Preventing mind-bogglingly bad social media moves is probably best handled simply by making sure employees know what’s inappropriate and the repercussions for showing bad judgement in what they post to the world.

Finally, it wouldn’t hurt to have a plan in place to deal with a social media disaster, just in case.

Tags: employees, social media