Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword | The Business Management Blog

by The Sage ERP Team on May 13th, 2011

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It doesn?t matter how old you are or where you live ? odds are, you have a Facebook page. More than 500 million people use the site, which means that if Facebook were a country, it would have the third-largest population in the world.

The surge in the popularity of various social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, has been a boon in many ways. Never before have businesses been able to so intimately and easily connect with their customers, and it?s never been easier for customers to get in touch with their favorite brands. From ?becoming a fan? on Facebook to directed a tweet to a company, it?s never been simpler to communicate with the companies that make the products we love.

And it?s not just the shoppers who are benefiting. Social media also has the advantage of being used for a number of business IT purposes, especially business intelligence and customer relationship management. Using data mining from BI systems, you can keep track of the kinds of people who follow your business and buy its products. Using that information, you can glean valuable factoids, like the average age of your customers, their primary gender, where most of them hail from, and so on. This information makes it easier for your company to effectively target the people most likely to buy from you.

But this always-on connectivity has a downside, too. First, there?s the possibility of employees mistakenly uploading the wrong information to a page, a page being hacked or manipulated by enemies of the brand or sensitive information being leaked. For example, the Red Cross got a smidgen of trouble recently when an employee mistook the company?s Twitter page for his own and tweeted about the beer availability at an upcoming party. (Luckily, no lasting damage was done.) Sarah Palin ? who is arguably a brand in and of herself ? has had her Facebook page manipulated a few times by people who disagree with her political stances, most famously by a group of people who changed the avatars to spell out unflattering phrases and then commented on her Facebook wall.

The other danger, of course, is the blurring between business and pleasure. Walk down any row of employees working at their computers and you?re guaranteed to see a few Facebook pages open (and you?d probably count a lot more if you started reading the minimized tabs in their browsers). And younger workers, especially, don?t necessarily know what?s appropriate when it comes to Facebook postings ? many have lost their jobs over uncouth status updates and other online badmouthing.

?With the Millenials? exodus to social media platforms from good old-fashioned email accounts, the lines between our business and personal lives are increasingly blurred,? explains Jodi Glickman of the Harvard Business Review blog. ?We live on our smart phones or blackberries and technology has enabled us to multi-task to such an extent that the once-clear delineations of personal life and work life have all but disappeared.?

Part of a good business leader?s job is to make sure that employees ? and executives ? understand that social media is a force that needs to be harnessed for good, not for evil. In other words, workers should know that their social media presences don?t just reflect on them ? they also reflect on the companies. Workers must be careful to present themselves and the company they work for in the best possible light in all social mediums.

Source: http://blog.sageerpsolutions.com/social-media-a-double-edged-sword/

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