Social media policy for corporation

     I faced key issue of social media the other day. In my industry, a lot of sales force uses tablet or laptop when selling products. This kind of electronic device allows the sales force to utilize internet tool, like email and social media. However, the more popular tool the social media become for sales force, the more compliance issue and situation happen.

     For example, a sale person wanted to utilize social media, Facebook, for her sales marketing. She started to use Facebook and seemed to be successful for a while. One day, she posted the customer’s name and product the customer wants without having any harm. She just wanted to inform her friends that she is now trying to sell the product. However, she was blamed for this behavior from the company and she needed to apology to her customer because she revealed her customer’s private information. The company didn’t have any policy and guideline for social media, so that it started to create social media policy and guideline when sales person using social media for sales and marketing. One difficult issue is that the company has a bunch of sales people and it seemed too difficult for it to spread the awareness of the importance of the policy and guideline to all of the sales force. Finally, the company decided to stop allowing the sales force to use Facebook for the sales and marketing purpose.

    This is too extreme example but, from the point of my view, I think the more diversify the marketing tools become, the more complicated and difficult the corporation supervises it. This is one of key issue when we use social media