Neil Berdiev

Imagine your executive office gets a call from The Boston Globe for comment on a highly controversial social media post made by your employee. The reporter wants to know if this provocative view is representative of your organization and if it is consistent with how you do business. Soon after clients began calling, fuming over the comments. And finally a board member and a regulator call, looking for an explanation.

This is probably one of your corporate PR nightmares, besides perhaps the president firing up or firing back at your colleague’s social media post in his midnight tweets.

Like never before, it is critical to have a social media corporate policy. What’s even more critical is to have this policy develop into awareness and active thought process, a thoughtful part of your business culture that builds on your colleagues’ natural talents and interests while protecting your good name from tragic social media faux pas.

A recent controversial opinion post by a New England commercial bank’s executive vice president and chief risk officer on LinkedIn on a social phenomenon publicized by the current administration made me revisit issues I faced a few years ago due to my interests in business writing – the risks and opportunities my employers had to evaluate and decide on. Here are some of the questions they were asking themselves:

• What part of social media is truly personal and what part is professional?
• How do we balance fostering visibility through our employees for our organization, as suggested in Wired.com and other resources, with risks of posting something we and our colleagues may live to regret?
• If our employees are involved in writing, posting, or the gig economy on their time, how do we balance allowing them to develop their talents to be fulfilled and engaged employees with managing risks to our organization?
• And my favorite and very blunt: What do we control, why and how, and how do we learn about a situation before it blows up on the front pages of Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal?

As social media permeates everything, with that come opportunities, risks and numerous business, ethical and legal implications. Suppose an employee of a commercial bank makes an honest comment about a particular investment service and creates good visibility for your bank. There’s one slight problem – one of your largest clients holds an equity stake in the service, and they are now livid about this, in their view, disparaging assessment labeling the service to be inferior to its competition. In another instance, an executive of a commercial bank makes comments in a public discussion forum that were well-received – until an activist group picks up the post and boycotts the bank for the views of the executive. Even well-intended social media activities can have unintended mishaps. The stronger and the more controversial the issues discussed, the greater may be the reaction of some on social media.

The most fundamental questions for your executive team to answer are:

Do we have a social media policy?

Do our employees know it and, more importantly, do they understand it?

Even more important, do they agree and do you have their buy-in?

Even much more important, are employees prepared to and do they actually follow your social media program?

Editor’s Note: this is a two-part column; the second part will focus on internal and external implications of a social media policy. 

Neil Berdiev is a commercial banker and co-founder of DNB Advisory LLC, a commercial credit advisory firm. He may be reached at neil@dnbadvisory.com.