The different ways organisations allow their employees to participate in online media

When I thought of this topic I came up with four distinct groups that organisations fall into when considering how their staff may engage in online social media,

• Ignore
• Disallow
• Manage
• Allow

Over time an organisation moves through these stages, as evidenced by telephony and computers within the workplace.

However whilst researching this post I found a fantastic article by Jeremiah Owyang in his Web Strategy blog, which did a far better job than I could of exploring these stages.

So rather than re-inventing the wheel, I recommend looking at this post, Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web.

Another post on the topic was made in the I'm not actually a Geek blog, Early: Companies Deputizing Their Employees as Brand Managers, who developed the image below.

My personal view is that organisations now need to move quickly towards the managed engagement approach to address the needs of customers. Ignoring or disallowing social media use is no longer a viable strategy.

How far an organisation moves from a carefully managed approach to a more general allowed approach is another matter. In my view it is closely reflective of the level of trust an organisation has in its staff and how well they guide and train them in the rights and wrongs of engagement.

Right now many organisations provide regular staff training on fraud prevention, financial management and similar types of processes and procedures. Perhaps in the future they will include training in social media engagement in this mix.