"We can't open this up to our employees, it will pull them away from work."
"What about legal implications? The FDIC regulates all our communications. An employee can distribute un-reviewed content to the world and we could liable."
"We lose control of our brand."
Quick, that's a corporate executive talking about what? Blogging? Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn?
Wrong.
The year is 1997 and that's a conversation about email.
In my first job out of college we did not have email, largely because of the above three reasons. Today, I travel across the country talking about social media and these are three of the main objections I often hear about why companies aren't embracing social media.
How quickly we forget.
Today, it would be silly to think of most companies functioning without email. In five years, the same will be said for social media.
Other parallels:
- 12 years ago everyone said they wouldn't have time to check email because they already spent a lot of time faxing, reading/writing memos and on the phone. Email reduced our dependencies on these communication channels. Today I'm told that with the flood of email we all receive, no one has time to Tweet. My argument? Done right, Twitter and other social networks reduce the amount of email you send, just as email reduced the number of memos we all typed.
- 12 years ago people said email was purely a social application and a way to distribute get-rich-quick-scams and pornography. I hear the same thing said about social media every day. We've all become pretty good at sifting through the crap and using email as a key part of our work environment.
- 12 years ago email was dismissed as a fad and thought to be a disruptive element that new college grads wanted. Probably don't need to expand on that one any further.
What about your company? Is social media part of your sanctioned (or unsanctioned) work flow? If not, why not?
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