Do you know what your employees, past employees and stake holders are saying about your company and brand?  While many brands and corporations are focusing their social media efforts on consumer/customer dialogues; many fail to monitor what their internal audiences are saying.

We’ve been seeing repeated patterns among employees of companies, both publicly traded and privately held…Does your company fall into this pattern?

At Buzzphoria, we use proprietary software to measure what’s being said about companies, brands and their competitors across all social media and web-based communications channels.  When we first begin working with clients, we run historic searches to provide a benchmark for where they are in social electronic conversations - who’s talking about them, what’s being said, where it’s being said, what’s the tone, sentiment, relevancy of the conversation (ie., how many people are monitoring that particular conversation and what is the level of influence of the sites, platforms and individuals who are having those conversations, etc).  This Social Media Reality Check, as we call it, provides valuable insights that shape our recommendations, strategy and implementation of our clients’ core social media outreach.

In addition to consumer/customer communications, we also spend a great deal of time working with our clients to identify the social media discussions that are taking place by stake holders within their organizations.

From an internal corporate communications standpoint the pattern that we’ve been seeing:

1.  Most of the clients we’re called in to work with (both private and public companies) do not have a blog/twitter/social media strategy policy related to employee communications.  Many have been calling us in to a) see if they need a policy, b) run a baseline to see what’s being said and c) craft a policy for them that is easy for employees to understand, is easy to monitor and enforce and is respectful of protecting proprietary corporate information while also being respectful of the employees’ personal rights…

2.  It has been more of the rule, rather than the exception, that we’ve found multiple employee run groups on social networking sites (not just business sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo; but also more generalized personal sites such as Facebook).  The groups and pages we’ve uncovered have by and large been using the corporate logo, have identified themselves by the corporate name and have encouraged and have been populated by both present and past employees.  In nearly every instance, the corporation hiring us was unaware that these groups existed.

3.  In addition, for each of the corporations that we’ve done this for, we have also uncovered both employee blogs and Twitter accounts.  While the bulk of the Twitter accounts and blogs we’ve found have been for personal use, we have found that in nearly all instances, the employee with these accounts is also sprinkling their personal conversations and communications with corporate information.

Since one of Twitter’s best uses is as a content aggregator, we’ve found that most Twitter accounts held by corporate employees has also been programmed to aggregate Twitter communications onto multiple social networking and blog platforms the employee possesses (for example - they send a Tweet on Twitter and the tweet is updated to their Facebook, Linkedin and Blog pages).

Some specific examples of information we’ve seen that can be damaging to the corporation:

-   employees conversing about new clients they’re going after

-   employees conversing about job and company dissatisfaction

-   employees conversing about looking for new jobs

-   employees conversing about problems (product failures, forthcoming earnings statements, possible recalls)

-   employees conversing about product development initiatives

Most of the time, the employees are not even aware that their conversations could potentially be having a negative impact on the corporation.

4.  For the majority of publicly traded companies we’re working with, we’ve found that both media and analysts are conversing on multiple platforms (Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, social media pages, etc) and that our clients were unaware these conversations were taking place.

Do you know what your employees and stake holders are saying about your company and or brand?