Is Social Media Sucking your Business Dry?

Being blissfully unaware of the entire social media landscape before embracing LinkedIn about two years ago, and then branching out over the last six months or so to embrace facebook, twitter, blogger, instant messaging, web-based e-mail and the like, I had no idea of the amount of time, that active participants in this so-called social media age, must commit to remain active and relative to their audiences.

As a management consultant, I am now concerned for all business owners who have employees with direct and unfettered internet access, and who do not employ an IT manager, or have a very good understanding themselves, of the social media landscape.
  
My concern stems from the fact that even with an IT manager or a good understanding of social media, it is far from an easy task to determine the extent to which company time and resources are being misappropriated through the private social media activities undertaken by employees.

Without one, or both of these elements, at your disposal to stem systematic abuse, your business profitability, is at the mercy of your employees.

Apart from the time such private activities can suck out of any business day, there is also the cost of bandwidth effectively stolen from your business and used to download music, movies, video clips etc to ipods, mobile telephones, flash drives and the like, for private use (the fact that such devices can also be used to download and steal business data, is a separate issue all together).

Those of you with wireless capabilities enabled in your business premises may, to your cost, find that employees and their friends are accessing your internet connection for downloads after hours, via smart phones or laptops operated from cars parked within range of your business broadband signal.

The critical danger will be where you have one, or more employees, who develop an addiction to social media activities. There are already terms such as Facebook addict, Twitter addict, and Social Media Whore, being bandied about on the internet, with some users applying these labels to themselves.

Don’t just think that it won’t affect any of your employees, and remember that it is not only the young, that are heavily into social media. You need to develop a real awareness of the dangers both financial, and potentially legal, of providing unfettered internet access to your employees. 

Remember that if you feed an addiction, it will only get worse.

As with gambling, alcohol, and illicit drug addicts, it is ultimately a downhill spiral, with the employer bearing the brunt of the collateral damage, and ultimately paying a high price, before eventually needing to dismiss the errant employee.

Don’t think social media is a passing fad. If you have lived in blissful ignorance like myself until recently, you are about to be hit by a fundamental change in the way in which the world communicates and transacts.

I am old enough to have commenced work before mainframe computing impacted on the workplace, and well before personal computers were thought of, and certainly many years before that other supposed passing fad, the internet, was available to the masses.

I have no doubt that unauthorised social media activities by employees are going to become a large and problematic issue for small business owners, especially those not equipped to fully understand, much less handle, the risks inherent in this growing problem.

Do you know just how much time your employees spend on unauthorised social media activities during working hours?

Would you have any idea if any of your employees are social media addicts?

Do you understand that this is an issue that you can ignore, but only at your own peril?

Posted via web from Unique Insights