Experts Speak on Using Social Media for Good

Amid headlines trumpeting privacy failures and PR nightmares stemming from employee use of popular social media tools such as Facebook and YouTube, it’s no surprise that many companies still struggle with whether and how to dip their toes in the social media pool.

Done right, online social media can help a company build its brand. Done wrong, however, it can wreck a company’s reputation, alienate customers, violate privacy laws, and potentially cost millions in damages. At the Compliance Week 2010 conference last week, executives from three companies that have plunged into social media—Best Buy, Johnson & Johnson, and Travelers Cos.—shared their stories and offered tips to other attendees.

All three executives stressed that every company will end up using social media in its own unique way. For example, Travelers, a property and casualty insurer with 30,000 employees, uses Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for activities such as tracking how competitors use social media. It has an iPhone application that lets customers report claims online. It also manages complaints and customer service online as well, according to David Baker, the company’s chief compliance officer.

Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson uses social media primarily to get feedback from customers about its products, said Assistant Corporate Secretary Doug Chia, an active user of social media tools himself.

Chia

“Our customers are hanging out on Facebook and MySpace, so we’re going to set up shop there and make sure we’re engaging in a dialogue with them,” Chia said. “We need to be there to be engaged, help shape the debate, and get feedback on what we’re doing right and wrong in terms of our products.”

J&J also has two corporate blogs: one about the company’s history and another about its current events. “It’s a way to communicate with the public outside of the formality of a press conference or a press release,” Chia said. This year J&J also published real-time updates from its annual meeting via its corporate Twitter account (it has more than 3,700 followers). And most recently, the company’s CEO used social media to communicate with the public about a recall of its children’s products.

Chia offered a lengthy list of issues for companies to think about before they engage in social media. Reputational issues topped the list.

“One the one hand there’s a lot of demand for the business to be out on social media, and there’s a lot of need to be out there—but on the other hand, you don’t want to do anything to destroy the reputation or change it in ways you really can’t control,” he said.

To that end, questions about transparency and accountability for the ideas a company promotes via social media become a major consideration, he said. “Once you’re out on social media, the expectations for transparency are much higher than they otherwise are,” he said.

Beyond the PR nuances to explore, companies must also worry about practical issues like who owns and oversees the company’s social media presence (a Twitter account or a Facebook page, for example). Employees need to be trained on company policies and drilled on how to react to specific situations. For example, Chia said, a pharmaceutical company like J&J must train employees on how to respond if someone posts a negative comment about an adverse reaction to a product.

Then come the other legal and compliance issues: copyright protections (or abuses) and intellectual property; privacy and consent policies; and responses to posts that disparage competitors or vendors. Regardless of how they use social media, Chia said, companies must plan what they want to accomplish with social media and how they want to be perceived.

Kathleen Edmond of Best Buy explains her company’s social media policy. Seated is Doug Chia of Johnson & Johnson.

“Unless you figure out how all of your social media pieces fit together and work together, you’re just throwing stuff at the wall,” he said.

Other Ideas

Best Buy’s chief ethics officer, Kathleen Edmond, writes a blog where she posts real-world ethics-related scenarios to educate the retailer’s 115,000-plus employees about, as she put it, “what gets them fired.”

The company’s chief marketing officer also has a blog, and both the CMO and the chief executive are on Twitter. Best Buy also uses texting as a method of hotline reporting—an idea Edmond took from the Los Angeles Police Department, which accepts 911 texts. The company also uses its “Twelpforce” on Twitter as a customer service tool, letting customers submit questions via tweet. When Edmond revised the company’s gifts policy, she used a wiki (think giant, collaborative online whiteboard) to get input from employees.

Although she initially found using social media a personal challenge, Edmond said, she urged others not to avoid it simply because it’s “not comfortable.” At companies with large, young workforces prone to quick turnover, central management may not even have much choice in the matter.

“It’s risky, but … we’ve got to be out there, pushing the edge, trying new things,” she said.

Pushing the edge does require some processes and policies to stay on the right side of the law, public opinion and common sense. Having those guidelines “allows you to get people to do what they need to, while preserving what you want to and keeping it consistent across the board,” Chia said.

“Unless you figure out how all of your social media pieces fit together and work together, you’re just throwing stuff at the wall.”

—Doug Chia,

Senior Counsel,

Johnson & Johnson

The policies themselves don’t need to be complex; Best Buy’s social media policy is less than one page long. “We call it the ‘Don’t Be Stupid policy’,” Edmond said. “It’s be human, be respectful, be honest, be transparent.”

Baker said Travelers formed a social media taskforce and adopted a three-page social media policy and nine-page user reference guide for its employees. Chia described J&J’s social media policy as “very principles-based.”

As for winning over the board of directors, Chia said directors often must be educated on the issue. Management has a duty to “educate the directors about social media and why it’s important to your company’s business strategy … how it works, and what you have in place to manage the whole thing,” he said.

Are leaks of confidential or material information a risk? Sure, Chia said, but those concerns are the same online as they are offline.

“Social media hasn’t changed anything,” he said. “People are blabbing insider information when they’re not supposed to. They have been for years.” The key is to train social media users on the company’s policies, and to remind them that even online, they still represent the company and company policies still apply, he said.