Consolidating Unofficial Social Networking Groups


Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 10:37am Thursday 19 November 2009

Have you ever checked Facebook or any other social networking websites to see if there are any unofficial groups created about your organisation? "I used to work at", "I work at", etc

For any organisation, there is the possibility that there maybe one or many unofficial group" created by past or present employees. Users create these groups to...
That's great - your employees are staying in touch (there will always be HR issues around this). But how can we consolidate ALL these unofficial social networking groups?

You can do this the easy way, or the HARD way. There is at least 3 different internal stakeholders who will want to get involved - Human Resources, Marketing and your Legal department.

I believe the organisation has the right, and should try taking control (or allowed to become an administrator) of the group. If you find there are a number of different groups online, you should contact each administrator, and try to close the group down/merge into a super group.

The easy way is to directly contact the administrator of the group and ask politely. If they are a current employee and you have a social media policy/procedure/guideline in place you may want to enforce this.

If not, you could try going the hard way and proceed with Legal action against the past employees. Such as use of a trademark, defamation, etc.

It’s your employer brand that you have worked so hard to build can be destroyed by social media within minutes.

What ever you do, you need to do something!