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Utilizing Gender Pay Issues to Inform HR Policies

Beth Livingston Examines Gender Roles and Their Impact on the field of HR

Beth Livingston, HRS Assistant Professor at Cornell University, studies gender roles and their impact on employer relationships. She is currently expanding work on a CAHRS grant, out of which was published an article in 2008. In 2011, Livingston started expanding on the paper, looking at sexist attitudes about women in workplace. “I’ve found that men with more sexist mindsets make more money than women, whereas men with egalitarian attitudes don’t show a gender-wage gap,” she explains.

As a human resource expert, Livingston wants to know what this means for employers and employees. “Why the wage gap?” asks Livingston. “Do individuals with different sexist attitudes negotiate differently? Is it discrimination? What is happening? Understanding interpersonal issues can help us take the next steps in terms of what to do about the wage gap,” she points out.

For instance, Livingston’s CAHRS research centers around employer/employee relationships. Each person’s role orientation was identified, and then each person was put in a mock interview situation, where one person played the part of the boss, and one person played the role of the employee. “We wanted to see if these people focused on different things during the interview based on their gender attitude,” explains Livingston, such as being more or less assertive. “Is a male with more egalitarianism focused more on salary? Or if someone gets paid less do they negotiate for more flexibility?” Initially, the results of the survey indicated a difference in how people negotiate. The thought is that traditional men are less likely to have flex time than egalitarian men.

The second step to the research included a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79)  The final part of the grant – in progress as this article goes to press — involves MILRs and undergraduates getting jobs right now. “We started off by determining their gender attitudes and then looked at their first job offers,” she explains. “How do they negotiate, and for what sorts of things? Did they get flex time? Did they ask for it?

“Even controlling for types of job, we have already found differences in wages in our 2008 research on gender-role attitudes,,” Livingston states.  As every company knows, rewards can be seen as more appealing than salary. One example would be a total package of rewards that includes all those things.”

“We intend to look at the data with a finer analysis. Some men value family – and this type of personality adds a nuance to gender distribution particularly in regards to work and family,” says Livingston. “Women may get paid less but they’re not dissatisfied by what they’re getting paid. Not all women and men have the same family values,” she explains. The research project will wrap up with a paper estimated to be completed by summer of 2013.

What’s Next?

Livingston is currently working with two PhD students on gender and how it relates to work and family. She’s interested in looking at employees holistically. “In order to understand how to look at rewards, you have to look at the total picture. I’ll be examining couples and how their interaction affects work decisions – particularly as they relate to ex-patriot positions,” she explains.

Livingston is looking to analyze how organizations address their employees’ work. It can be easy to talk about policy but more broadly, how do employees experience this in terms of their partners?

Moreover, Livingston is looking at negative attributions such as “how organizations can reduce blame and provide resources with the possibility of avoiding negative attributions.” For instance, every employee will, at some point, experience negative work and family spillover—but who do they blame for it? Who is perceived to have caused the conflict? How individuals perceive these interactions and how they attribute blame for them might also help us understand how organizations can manage this inevitability.

The Power of Words

Livingston is also pursuing the stereotype of women as catty, and is working on an article about the label of conflict as catty. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandburg – whose Leaning In spurred a debate about the privilege of having a career and family — commented on the book, saying, “Everyone loves a fight — and they really love a catfight,” she writes. “The media will report endlessly about women attacking other women, which distracts from the real issues. When arguments turn into ‘she said/she said,’ we all lose.”

“When men debate, it can be heated and filled with conflict. But when women have the same types of debates, it becomes a label,” points out Livingston. We examine the effects of how people are perceived as a result, she says. And above and beyond the “catty” label, she’s looking to prove how careful we need to be about words and also about how conflict is perceived. “Ideally, more information about this topic can reduce incivility and bullying and how is it perceived in the workplace,” she states.

In the end, Livingston points out, how can we fundamentally judge and see people if we don’t understand the psychology behind the behavior? “Policies can be put in place, but that’s not proactive. We’d like to get to the point where managers will have tools to learn to perceive but not label conflict,” she states.

Talk with Beth Livingston about any of her current projects – or to get involved in a future gender-role research endeavor.

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Social Media Experts: Why Organizations Need Them

Many people are critical of the notion of social media experts, falsely claiming they don’t exist – and by extension implying they aren’t necessary. These criticisms, combined with the pervasiveness, low cost, and relative ease of use of social technologies, lead many people to assume (also falsely) that DIY and “give it to the intern” approaches are effective strategies for leveraging these new tools. This post counters some of the most frequent criticisms and articulates the need for social media expertise as a part of eCornell’s Tech Tuesday series from The Denovati Group.

Arguments Against Social Media Experts

In the context of new social technologies, “expert” is often perceived as a four-letter word, and many people decry the label “social media expert.” Certain critics have decided there is no such thing as a social media expert or social media expertise, offering arguments like the following to support their positions:

  • It’s too new. False. The underlying technologies have been around for almost 20 years, longer if you consider some of their digital precursors. And the core characteristics – such as user-generated content and social sharing – date back to our earliest days on the planet.
  • Things change too much and too often. That’s true, but the truth isn’t unique to this set of technologies and/or related disciplines. Professionals in many areas will quickly attest to the dynamism in their own fields, companies, and industries.
  • Only a small elite can claim expert status. If we define expert in very narrow terms as a pinnacle achievement, then yes, only a few people can claim it. But if you look up the definition of the term and rely on its denotation, you’ll find it applies to a much broader group of people. Plus, I think it’s important to recognize that it’s a relative, as well as absolute, label. I may know a lot about employment law, for example, but I would defer to a labor law attorney as an expert in the field.
  • It’s not just about the tools. Of course it’s not, but understanding how the technologies, tools, and platforms are used is critically important to success in using them. There are countless people who are “experts” in their core disciplines who would fail miserably in 2.0 spaces because of their lack of social media expertise. More on that in the next section.

Ironically, in an effort to minimize the importance of social media expertise, these critics are effectively holding social media to a higher standard than other professions, functions, and disciplines – where expertise is not only respected, but sought out. But the criticism is understandable to some degree: too many people convey false impressions of their expert status, presenting their knowledge and skills as being more comprehensive and/or in-depth than they are.

More often than not, when people make sneering references to social media experts and/or disdain the use of the term, what they’re referring to is the proliferation of charlatans in response to the dramatic growth of digital social media in the past few years. This proliferation may be unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising and hardly unique to the Digital Era. Charlatans, swindlers, hustlers, hucksters, quacks, frauds, snake oil salesmen, and mountebanks are endemic to the human condition. It is wise to be wary of “false prophets,” but concerns about being misled shouldn’t cause organizational leaders to not seek out valuable guides to help them move forward in cyberspace.

The Need for Social Media Expertise

Regardless of whether we use the “expert” label, there are many reasons why organizations should invest in people with social media expertise:

1. The road to social media hell is paved with ignorance.

Cyberspace abounds with stories of social media failures, often by people who should have known better:

  • Experienced journalists and public relations professionals who “tweeted without thinking”
  • A CEO who set up a fake blog to disparage a competitor
  • A teacher who blogged disparagingly about her students and a principal who friended students on Facebook using a false identity
  • Community managers who fanned the flames of a Facebook attack
  • Marketers and advertisers who underestimated the social media backlash to their companies’ campaigns or actions, or who created fake social media-based commercials and/or endorsements
  • Human resources and legal professionals who developed overly-broad social media policies
  • Hiring managers who engaged in unethical practices using social media

I could go on, but the point is that contrary to many critics’ core argument, social media isn’t “just” anything. Yes, it’s a set of tools and technologies, but it’s a very powerful set that can cause significant harm if used incorrectly. As I wrote in Social Media: From Novelty to Utility:

Saying social media is “just” a communications tool is like saying a nuclear power plant is “just” a way to turn on the lights.

2. Simple doesn’t mean easy

It takes less than a minute to set up a Twitter account. And perhaps another few seconds to send the first “is this thing on?” tweet. But the simplicity of the user interface hardly ensures one’s effectiveness in using the channel. There’s a new language and norms to learn, as well as hazards and mistakes to avoid. The same is true for other public platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr, and tools like blogging and wikis and videocasts and podcasts. Social media rookies regularly underestimate them, often to their own detriment.

3. Strategy trumps tactics

The ways in which an individual or organization can leverage social media are virtually limitless, but the ways in which they should leverage the technologies need to be driven by goals and objectives, industry and stakeholder characteristics, and a host of other factors, including a sophisticated understanding of whether and how social media would be more effective than traditional tools.

4. Change is hard

For most rookies – including organizational leaders – social media is threatening, intimidating and discomfiting. Bringing about the necessary changes to leverage social media successfully requires in-depth understanding of the technologies and their applications and implications, as well as the ability to translate that understanding into language lay people can understand and the ability to help them connect the dots.

5. Even when it’s your mountain to climb, having a Sherpa can help

I’ve been immersed in social media for over three years, not just as a practitioner, but as a student and teacher. I can say with confidence that it’s impossible for someone just getting started to quickly match the knowledge, skills, and understanding of someone who’s been intimately involved with new digital technologies for some time. More importantly, these “experts” can help rookies climb their learning curves more efficiently and effectively and provide guidance to increase the likelihood of success and minimize the risks of failure.

Degrees of Expertise

It’s important to recognize that there is no single definition of expertise and no “one-size-fits-all” model to leveraging that expertise. The most appropriate expert for a given purpose in a particular organization will depend on factors like the organization’s:

  • Strategic goals and objectives, both short term and longer term
  • Industry and client characteristics
  • Level  of technological sophistication
  • Financial resources
  • Employee skill levels and capacity

Rand Fishkin of Moz provides a chart that offers a nice starting point for understanding different levels of social media expertise. I would argue that we can distinguish different levels of social media professionals the same way we might professionals in other functional areas: coordinators, analysts, managers, designers, planners, strategists, and advisors. Some organizations will need to acquire or develop individuals with expertise at all these levels, whereas others will only need some of them. For some the best solution will be to bring the expertise in house; for others it will be to use one or more service providers. And of course the right solution will change over time, as technology and an organization’s circumstances and needs continue to evolve.

Click here to view the updated post on the Denovati SMART Blog.

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Assemble the Social Media Policy Team

This article dives deeper into the second step of the ABCs of Creating an Effective Social Media Policy: Assembling the team of representatives to create your social media policy.

As I’ve discussed, the first step in creating a successful social media policy is to identify the key stakeholders to make part of your social media policy team. This article covers the importance of including not only your organization’s official representatives (such as your Legal Counsel, Chief Information Officer and/or the HR Director) but also those whose unofficial status as social media experts makes them invaluable resources in an undertaking such as this.

Mailroom Frank: To Include or Not?

Unlike in many of the other areas of policy development, social media’s unbreakable integration with ever-changing technologies make it essential to involve not only those with expertise in the areas of policy and compliance, but also those whose knowledge of what’s happening “out there” in terms of technological advancements in  social media platforms. In addition, while it’s not always true that having a diverse set of viewpoints results in a more effective process–think death by committee–what is true is that the likelihood of missing a potentially devastating risk is significantly decreased when people with different viewpoints evaluate that risk from multiple angles. More eyes almost always results in more perspectives. The challenge, of course, is to determine how far your organization is willing to go as it relates to including those with a different viewpoint on the team. Clearly, there’s no value in having 21-year-old Frank from the mailroom on the team–or is there? And we all know that we only need one rep from marketing on the team–or do we?

The ability to include the unofficial expertss may also be more or less difficult, depending upon your organization’s culture. Are you an inclusive culture, where the view is “All for one and one for all”? Or are you a separatist culture, where the prevailing view around roles and responsibilities might be “Good fences make for good neighbors”?

Inclusive Cultures

If inclusive, it’s important to ensure that we don’t create a social media policy team which is too large and therefore prone to decision gridlock. The key to designating people in an inclusive culture is to be able to clearly articulate why each of the individuals has been chosen. When doing so, get your explanation down to two to three sentences; any longer and people will see you as overselling, or worse, defensively justifying.

Let’s take a look at what such a statement might look like.

“In order to be both representative and move with speed, we have decided that the social media policy team should be no larger than 10 people. We’ve selected Bill from marketing to be on the team because he has both an extensive understanding of how our customers are using social media platforms as well as good competitive intelligence on what new platforms are likely to be adopted by these customers in the future.”

 Again, short, understandable, to the point.

Separatist Cultures

If our culture is more separatist, we’ll have to work a little harder to get organization buy-in to include these unofficial experts onto the social media policy team. One approach we could use is to do a simple quiz before the first meeting of our social media policy team in order to clearly point out knowledge gaps of the “official representatives.” Unless keeping up with social media trends is a full-time job for these representatives, there’s a good chance that many of them will not be as familiar with either the scope or utility of many of the newer social media platforms. This provides a great opening to introduce a handful of unofficial experts onto the team.

Even in a separatist culture, it’s important to be able to clearly articulate the reasons for an individual’s involvement. As an example:

“We’ve selected our summer intern, Katy, from IT to be on the team because of her extensive knowledge of which social media platforms Gen X and Gen Y are using. We’ve also asked her to act as a reverse mentor to the team, helping them understand how these newer platforms work as well as what older platforms people are beginning to abandon.”

Again short, understandable, to the point.

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What We Follow Friday

Every Friday, we highlight some of the most interesting articles we’ve been reading from around the web. We cover hospitality marketing, hotel revenue management, hospitality social media marketing, SEO, SEM, and a few others for fun. If you come across an article you think we should be reading, tweet it to us, post it to our facebook page, or leave us a comment at the bottom of the page.

This week, we’ve found some great pieces from quite a few of our favorite news sources: HeBS, tnooz, and more. Enjoy!Read More

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Social Media Policy Teams

Recently, the team at eCornell asked the Director of Social Engagement for the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), Curtis Midkiff, for his insights on forming social media policy teams. Curtis has also appeared in eCornell’s Ask the Expert segments for our newest certificate Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice.

Are there particular advantages to having a social media policy team for organizations with a global reach?

Yes, because social media influences every aspect of the organization, so it’s very important that you have a team that can bring those different perspectives when you’re creating the policy, and implementing the policy. It’s good to have different perspectives because social media is viewed differently by different members of the organization. So what that team can do is make sure that the policy that you create, and the policy that you implement, takes into account all of those different perspectives. So that you have a balanced policy that’s not too far balanced, or imbalanced, on the governance side, or not too loosely balanced on the implementation side. So that you have a good balance of both that you can share with your employees.

In general, what are the main challenges in creating and managing social media policy teams?

I think the main challenge in managing these teams is mainly more so on the logistics side of it, because usually when you involve people from different departments and different areas, there are a lot of logistics challenges in terms of setting meetings, in terms of setting agenda for meetings, in terms of maintaining the working committees that you need to have, and the subcommittees you need to have. It’s more of a logistical issue than anything else, because managing these teams, they’re people who are committed to the organization, so you’re not going to have a problem with their follow-through and their commitment. It’s just that this is one additional thing that you’re probably going to add to people at the senior level of your organization, who have priorities related to their organizational goals. So it’s very important that you do what is necessary to make sure that logistically, it is very simple for these people to be involved in the team. You make it very simple in terms of how you set the meetings, you make it simple in terms of what the scope of work you’re dealing with, the issues you’re dealing with, your goals. So that way you can maximize the time that you have.

What parts of the organization must be represented on the social media policy team beyond the typical HR, IT, and legal functions?

So when you have your foundation, then that’s kind of your first tier. Your second tier, folks that definitely need to be there, you need have someone there from your communications team. This is important because there has to be a definitive difference that’s set in terms of who are the official spokespersons for social media. So most likely your media team, public relations team, public affairs team, whatever it’s called in your organization, has probably set up criteria and standards for official spokespersons. They need to be at the table when the social media policy is being created, drafted, and implemented.

Beyond those folks who form the foundation, other folks that you have on the social media policy team should simply reflect your organization and those who have key touchpoints with your constituencies. So in many cases that means representatives from your marketing team are a part of it, as well as representatives from your customer service team may be a part of it. So those parts can be determined by your business functions and who has the potential to benefit most, use social media most, or who have touchpoints with the organization.

Is there a role for unofficial participants on the social media policy team?

There is definitely a role for unofficial participants. And to define that role, it would those who have a level of expertise, or understand or influence on social networks that can provide additional perspectives or inform you on ways that can shape your policy. It’s really important in organizations because one of the things we talk about at social media is done is that it really changes the way we look at influence. Your employees have developed these social networks, and a lot of times the folks who are most influential on social networks are not always at the top of the organizational chart. It is people who are distributed throughout your organization. And it’s really great because that allows your committee that is developing the policy to really not develop this policy in a vacuum, to really develop this policy in a manner where they have taken into consideration a snapshot of what’s happening in the social media world now and also created a policy that’s flexible enough to be adapted as social media changes. And the only way you can do that is by not just limiting your planning team members to specific levels of leadership, to specific departments, but also making sure there is room on the committee, a couple of seats, for those that have exhibited expertise in social media and who can share that expertise with the rest of the team.

Can the social media policy team help manage intergenerational conflict in the organization around social media behaviors?

[With a new social media policy,] there’s going to be a generational gap, yes, because you have groups of people who are digital natives, mostly your millenials who grew up in the social media era. And you’re going to have other workers who have been within the company longer and who have operated successfully in the company without social media. So now they’re being asked to adapt what they’ve done well for so long, to a new tool that they may not be aware of. So the social media planning team can be a good leader in that respect in a couple of aspects.

First, by commissioning some sort of research as to social media use and comfort within the organization. And conducting that research in a manner to have a correlation, or to establish if there’s any correlations between a certain generation and their comfort with social media. You may find that there’s not intergenerational differences, there may be interdepartmental differences. So what the social media planning team can do is make sure that similar to, like a city council or other governing body, that there’s a chance for public comment. While they’re developing this policy it’s almost like developing legislation. Make sure there’s a chance for public comment so you can identify the potential roadblocks and the potential issues that lie beyond that room.

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Twitter for Rookies

Still not certain whether you should take the Twitter plunge? Or do you consider yourself a Twitter Rookie? The best way to determine its value is to give it a try. Focus on using Twitter professionally rather than personally – including staying current with local, national, and global news. This post offers simple best practice suggestions for setting up your profile and getting started as part of eCornell’s Tech Tuesday series from The Denovati Group.

First: Why Use Twitter Professionally at All?

As far as I’m concerned, every professional can benefit from having a Twitter account. That doesn’t mean we all have to care what people are having for lunch, who the mayor of the local Home Depot is, or what celebrities are doing, thinking, or selling. It also doesn’t mean that we have to share (or overshare) the banalities of our own lives, amass hundreds or thousands of followers, or strive for a high Klout score.

Contrary to popular perception, media hype, and the passionate proclamations of early-adopters and Twitter mavens, Twitter views itself as an “information network” rather than a “social network.” Specifically, as described on the About Twitter page,

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news about what you find interesting. Simply find the accounts you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

This description directly addresses the first item in my Twitter Worst Practices post: namely, the insidious and somewhat tyrannical assumption that all Twitter users must tweet. Reluctance to talk or share via Twitter is one of the primary reasons many later adopters are still hesitant to sign up. The reality is that Twitter is an incredibly powerful listening channel. It offers fantastic opportunities for everyone – especially busy professionals – to receive and screen a high volume of news, information and resources efficiently and effectively. It is perfectly appropriate to open a Twitter account with the intent to just listen. You never have to send a single tweet. Twitter even says so themselves:

You don’t have to build a web page to surf the web, and you don’t have to tweet to enjoy Twitter. Whether you tweet 100 times a day or never, you still have access to the voices and information surrounding all that interests you. You can contribute, or just listen in and retrieve up-to-the-second information. Visit fly.twitter.com to learn more about what’s yours to discover.

 

Best Practice Suggestions

Here are my best practice suggestions for setting up your profile and getting started. To keep things simple, I am going to focus on using Twitter professionally rather than personally, including staying current with local, national, and global news.

Choosing a Username (i.e., Your Handle)

  • Keep it short – 10 characters or fewer
  • Devise something that connects to your personal and/or professional identity, but be careful not to infringe on someone else’s brand
  • Make sure it won’t embarrass you, your colleagues, or your organization (i.e., no cutesy names or nicknames, no off-color humor)
  • Think about how the handle will read/sound to others, particularly when it’s viewed in all lower-case letters

Including a Picture (yes, you should have one)

  • You don’t need to restrict yourself to a headshot, but you should choose an image that accurately and appropriately reflects your professional identity
  • Make sure you have the right to use the image
  • Pick something that is both clear and attractive in a thumbnail version

Adding Your Name, Website, & Bio

  • Name: Use your real name
  • Website: If you don’t have a website to link to, link to your LinkedIn profile
  • Bio: Since you only have 160 characters, it’s okay to use key words in creating your bio rather than trying to craft a sentence. Remember to focus on your professional identity rather than your personal identity. It’s okay to include some relevant personal information, but be careful about including things that could be misperceived or might undermine your professional brand. If you have a LI headline/tagline you like, and it fits, by all means include it here.

Setting Up Mobile Access: Because tweets are like headlines, they’re extremely easy to digest and manage in small bites. That makes them perfect for what I call “interstitial time” – e.g., when you’re commuting or traveling, while waiting for someone, before you’re ready to get out of bed in the morning. To facilitate that, make sure you set your account up to send your tweets to your phone (i.e., via 40404) and/or download one of the Twitter apps to your phone and/or tablet.

Following Others

  • Accounts to target
    • Local, national, and international news sources
    • Professional and industry associations
    • Academic and research institutions, including your alma mater(s)
    • Your own organization, clients, prospects, competitors
    • Organizations you’d like to work for
    • Bloggers and thought leaders
  • Tips
    • Make sure you’re following official accounts
    • Get ideas from checking out the accounts followed by others and/or those recommended by Twitter
    • Review an account’s activity before deciding whether it’s a valuable source for you
    • If the volume of activity becomes overwhelming, find a way to dial things down by unfollowing some of the noisier and/or less valuable accounts

Restricting Followers: Assuming you don’t plan to start tweeting initially, you should make your account private by selecting the “Protect my Tweets” option. This way, no one will be able to follow you without your permission. Doing so will not affect your ability to follow others.

Building Twitter into your Schedule

  • Tune in at least once a day, for 5-15 minutes
  • Scan headlines and either follow the links to items that pique your interest or forward them to yourself via email to read later

Learning the Language and Basic Conventions

  • The best way to learn is to immerse yourself in the Twitter stream and glean meaning from the activity itself
  • Here’s a simple set of Twitter symbols and terms to get you started:
    • @ is used in front of a Twitter handle to directly reference an account; it also creates a hyperlink to their account
    • #, aka a hashtag, is a way of collecting tweets around a specific topic or theme; it also creates a hyperlink to a page of tweets that include the hashtag
    • RT = retweet (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet)
    • MT = modified tweet (i.e., resharing someone’s tweet after modifying the text)
    • FF = Follow Friday, a way of recommending specific accounts to follow (fading practice)
  • You can also identify typical Twitter conventions by watching the activity of others, but don’t assume it’s all good – best practices are constantly evolving
  • If you see something you’re not sure about, check out the Twitter Glossary or the Twitter Basics section of the Help Center to learn more

Click here to view the original post on the Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) website and access related resources.

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The ABCs of Creating an Effective Social Media Policy

In most cases, companies create new social media policies to fix recent problems. All too often, the process looks like the following: An inappropriate employee action is discovered by management who immediately requests either HR or the Legal Department to craft a new policy dealing with the issue. A collection of “official experts” is quickly thrown together and sits down to write what they consider to be an appropriate response to the past infraction. This new policy is then hastily communicated to employees via email or the organizational intranet. And the entire process is repeated once the next new infraction occurs. As you can see, this procedure is far from effective causing employees to both ignore and in some cases, completely disregard critical safeguards you’re trying to put in place.

To develop a social media policy that is well-received by employees and capable of accomplishing the company’s goals, organizations should utilize a simple procedural framework. Just think “A-B-C.”

A – Assemble your team

The first step in creating a successful social media policy is to assemble a team of people who will be responsible for drafting the regulations. This team should be composed of professionals who hold positions of executive authority within the organizations, as well as non-executives who bring specialized knowledge or expertise to the table. For example, an entry-level employee with an advanced degree in data security would be an asset to this team even though he doesn’t work in management.

After you have assembled the team, you must evaluate your organization’s current position with regard to social media. One of the easiest ways to do this is by surveying your team members. Ask them about their knowledge of any state or federal laws that affect employees’ use of social media. You should also ask them what they know about employees’ current use of social media platforms. To obtain more in-depth knowledge, distribute confidential questionnaires to all employees.

B- Baseline the process and garner support

Analyze the data you obtained through your surveys and discussion to determine your organization’s baseline of policy awareness and social media use. Next, garner support from the people who will play key roles in the development of your new policy. Assign specific tasks to each member of your team, and reach out to anyone outside the team who will need to approve your new policy after it is complete.

C- Create and communicate

Use the information you have gained and the expertise of your team’s members to develop a social media policy that works for your company and communicate this policy to the rest of the organization. Not every social media policy will be the same. However, it’s generally wise to include a few basic principles. For example, when designating who should release social media posts on behalf of your company, be extremely specific. Employees should understand exactly who will speak on social media, when they will speak and what they will say.

Finally, you must communicate your new social media policies to employees. This requires more effort than simply distributing electronic copies of the policy. Take some time to discuss the policies with employees to be sure that they understand them completely. As time goes on, revisit your policies when you need to and update them as needed.

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Consumers Own the Brand

Marketers sometimes may think that companies own the brands that they promote, but in fact, brand ownership lies with the customer as it is in the minds of consumers where our brands truly live.

It’s important for you to understand that brands live in consumers’ minds as a set of beliefs and associations. Coca-Cola’s secret formula may live inside a bank vault in Atlanta, but the Coca-Cola brand does not. It exists in the form of images, commercial jingles and associations that consumers carry around with them in their heads.Read More

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Everyone is on the Marketing Team

Who holds responsibility for marketing? While we as marketers certainly like to say we are in charge of our domain, the truth is, just about everyone in your organization plays a part.

One of publishing’s best known anecdotes tells how 10 years following initial publication of Stephen King’s The Stand he published an expanded edition. He explained that the original release required cutting about one-third of his content. This request came neither from editors nor publishers, who loved the book and cheered the full content. Instead it came from the accounting department. It did not matter how good the story was, the number crunchers said. A book that big would cost more than the market for Stephen King books could bear at that time.

This real-life example demonstrates how responsibility for marketing involves more than the department, sales force, or advertising. In this case offering a quality product with an appealing design to an established market following advanced promotion did not suffice for a realistic marketing plan. Notice that even those elements involve editing, art, design, sales, advertising, marketing, and production staff already. Despite all that, one of the most crucial marketing factors — product cost — meant that a massive work of literature needed one out of every three words cut.

Advertising is an important part of marketing, and you may say, “Advertising makes me buy products or services.” But if you ask a group of 19-year-olds what kind of toothpaste they use, about 90 percent of them use the same toothpaste they did when they were 6 years old. In this case, what determined the brand of toothpaste a 19-year-old uses? It’s whatever their parents bought, rather than advertising. Their parents might have thought about the purchase partially based on advertising, but it’s about a lot of other things. Likewise marketing and how it impacts consumers is much more than just advertising.

Modern marketing must overcome existing marketing momentum, such as the power of social media and search engines. This challenge only begins with official company sites. In 2009 a Domino’s Pizza employee in Conover, NC damaged the entire brand by posting a video on YouTube showing him tainting products. That video made its way around the world. ABC News credits Domino’s with proactive response, and using the same social media that distributed the content as vehicles to counteract the damage.

One employer takes a different route to enlist all employee personal influence in marketing. A New York City CBS affiliate reports that the CEO of Rapid Realty offers his employees a 15 percent raise for getting a tattoo of the company logo — any size, any place. So far 40 employees have accepted the offer. One commissioned employee expects it to mean $25,000 to $40,000 more in her paycheck over a year. Human Resources may be the most neglected department in marketing strategies, even though it hires everyone involved.

Through team and morale building activities it engages greater interaction among departments. It is also best positioned to recognize employee aptitudes conducive to a positive company image. The best employees to promote a solid company image may not be in a marketing role at all right now. So even when the Marketing knows customer desires, it takes Research & Design to figure out how to make it happen, and Production to give it shape. It takes everyone on the team to preserve a viable public image, and share what the company intends.

 

By Doug Stayman, Associate Dean for MBA Programs, Associate Professor of Marketing, Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management

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Smart Social Media Policy Starts With Managers: 5 Key Questions to Ask

With social media, what you don’t know can seriously hurt your organization. One 2010 survey found that employees estimate spending roughly four hours every day checking multiple email accounts, with up to two hours spent on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. A 2012 Salary.com survey found that 64 percent of employees visit non-work related websites daily. And don’t think blocking employee access to social media on company networks is the answer; personal smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, and easily fill the gap.

The rub for today’s organizations is that while social media use at work has definite risks, it also is one of the best ways to empower and engage employees. Increasingly, in our connected 24/7 businesses, the line between work and personal time is blurring. This is especially true for Generation Y employees; as long as they meet deadlines and deliver, these employees don’t feel that it’s particularly useful to distinguish between time spent updating Twitter or engaged in team meetings. Organizations may beg to differ, especially when an offensive or inappropriate blog post or tweet can damage their brand, lower employee morale, and even lead to workplace lawsuits.

Yet, most organizations don’t really know how their employees are using social media, either personally or professionally, let alone what impact it’s having on employees’ overall levels of productivity.

That’s why it’s so important, before you set policy, to know how your managers currently handle social media use at work, as well as how its use by employees is effecting their management. Get at these fundamental issues by asking managers five key questions:

  1. Have your employees’ use of social media ever triggered a workplace lawsuit or regulatory investigation?
  2. What impact have your employees’ personal use of social media during work hours had, if any, on their productivity?
  3. How do you use social media, if at all, to help manage your projects and employees?
  4. Have you reviewed all applicable federal and state laws governing electronic data content, usage, monitoring, privacy, e-discovery, data encryption, business records and other legal issues in all jurisdictions in which you operate, have employees or serve customers?
  5. Could you comply with a court-ordered “social media audit”, by producing legally compliant business blog posts, email messages, text messages and other electronically stored information (ESI) within 990 days?

Social media can speed innovation and collaboration, but ONLY if your employees know how to both use it as well as steer clear of its many pitfalls. Start by asking managers these simple questions; they often surface extremely important information that, especially in larger organizations, you may not have been aware of. Finally, remember that for reasons of both confidentiality and fear, getting access to this sort of information is not always easy. It’s therefore important that organizations create mechanisms by which examples of social media use (and abuse!) can be regularly shared with the broader employee base.

Guest Post on Women of HR

 

By Steve Miranda

Steve Miranda is Managing Director of Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), a leading partnership between industry and academia devoted to the field of global human resource management. He is also a faculty author of the new eCornell certificate program,Social Media in HR: From Policy to Practice. Prior to CAHRS, Miranda was Chief Human Resource and Strategic Planning Officer for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world’s largest professional HR association, serving over 260,000 members in over 100 countries.