Louis Halpern's View

Manchester United banned its players from Twitter. The accounts of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, and Darren Fletcher have already been removed as the club attempts to control the flow of news from the locker room and prevent players speaking out of turn. In September 2009, striker Wayne Rooney ranked as one of the football’s most prolific twitter-users, with 22,200 followers….

My thoughts on this personal and brand reputation management issue on this are….

While Manchester United’s decision to ban its players from Twitter will prevent leaking sensitive information and reduce the risk to its reputation from ill-considered player tweets, simply banning everyone from the platform is a myopic, draconian measure.

What Sir Alex Ferguson has failed to realise is the positive impact that allowing players to engage with fans online in the right way can have for the Manchester United brand, especially in light of their current financial challenges. People respond most passionately to other people online, and Twitter provides such a huge opportunity for teams to really tap into their fan-base support. A more progressive approach would have aimed to educate players about Twitter and other social media platforms and put in place common sense guidelines for their usage, harnessing the positive opportunities rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We are ‘living’ more and more in the online world. Businesses are now aware that for them to truly interact with their target audiences they must build and maintain an online presence through social media, rather than just via online advertising. This applies to large, blue chip multinationals and ‘local’ SMEs alike, and has been addressed by many companies with varying degrees of success.

With a massive upside for businesses that successfully use social media, it is perhaps surprising that many employers are wary of getting involved. This may be attributable to a lack of appreciation of that potential or due to the fact that these employers do not fully understand how to use the social media tools available.

Ignorance is not longer an excuse. In the Internet Age, businesses cannot hide behind indifference or an unmanned customer services phone-line; no brand is off-limits, all are open to potentially hostile discussion. Even if your company isn’t engaging with online communities, it is very likely that someone else out there is talking about you online and this could be damaging to your reputation, especially if you are not in a position to respond.

Using social media involves engaging with potential customers, businesses and stakeholders online as well as with anyone else who has an opinion on your company.

It is important to remember that successful social media is an on-going process: reputations are created, established, and need to be maintained. It is also a two-way process. Businesses are expected to have interactive conversations with members of the online public; a brand which simply exists online as a faceless and uncommunicative ‘presence’ will not succeed in reducing the threats to its reputation.

The positives and negatives of employees online

The danger for businesses attempting to build an online presence is that employees may harm the project by using the Internet to post their feelings or worse, vent their frustrations. What an employee posts online, even via a personal account, can have direct implications for the reputation of their employer. Time and time again, the national media has published stories in which employees have damaged their employer’s brand: the policeman sacked by The Met for posting naked photos on a dating website, retail staff in Currys / PC World insulting customers online, and NHS works sacked because of a Facebook game are all salient examples.

There are now also legal implications for anyone posting inappropriate content to sites such as Facebook and Wikipedia which, as an employer, it is vital that you make your employees aware of.

Businesses are not investing enough resources in educating their staff on online reputation management and the consequences of their online actions for the company that they work for. Businesses must take a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy or they risk causing irreparable damage to their brand.

Don’t let this put you off building an online presence however; a company’s employee can be its most effective advocate, and can directly sway the opinion of customers and stakeholders. Customers buy a product or use a service if they feel good about the company that they’re buying from, which can be directly impacted by staff actively posting positive sentiment online.

How to educate employees to use the internet appropriately and effectively

Having a more digitally literate employee base will help your company be better equipped to protect its online reputation.  To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement, so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct, whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Make sure all employees are aware of privacy setting options available to them on their online profiles
• Ask colleagues to take down any unprofessional pictures, videos or content of themselves, you or other employees in the company
• Empower employees to use social media to help the company
• Train key members of staff as social media tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff

Social media is about being responsible for and engaging with a network. By being proactive, educating your employees, and taking charge of your company’s online presence, you can effectively manage your reputation online for the better.

In an age where young people are connecting with their friends online every day, access to the internet and online communications services is no longer a privilege for the few that can afford it; it is now part of every young person’s daily life.

As CEO of a digital agency, and a parent myself, I’ve always been vocal about the need to educate not just our children, but also parents, and how youngsters can safely and sensibly make the most of the online world that is available to them.

Where adults have tended to be in the dark about what their kids do online, seeing it as risky and to some extent unproductive, young people have always been highly motivated to participate and engage with digital platforms. Unlike adults however, they’re not streetwise, they don’t understand the threats.

In order to get a picture of how UK parents’ perceptions to their children’s online activity, we commissioned the first ever Digital Literacy Report, launched today.

In the poll with research specialists YouGov, we were pleased to find that the majority of parents see a need to teach their children about how to conduct themselves online, and have demanded the Government introduce lessons to improve young people’s understanding of online privacy and the value of their personal reputation with 69 per cent of parents calling for compulsory lessons to be introduced as part of the national curriculum.

This in part is born of the fact that almost half (48%) of adults asked admitted they were worried that their children’s online actions will potentially harm their future chances of getting into a chosen university or landing a first job. Parents recognise that online comment or mistakes made by young people on sites such as Facebook, Bebo and YouTube will go on to impact their adult lives.

Unfortunately the report also showed there is a lack of control among parents over what exactly children are doing when they log onto the web. With more children accessing sites like Facebook through their mobile phones instead of family PCs, parents are struggling to stay on top of what their children do online, with 44 per cent conceding they don’t ever check the content their kids are accessing or what they are posting online.

If we do not proactively teach young people about the impact of their online activity how can they better protect and promote themselves? There needs to dialogue between parents and their children, as well as at school, where online socialising is recognised as a social and technical skill for contemporary society. Schools as well should be looking to ways to encourage children to use the online tools at their disposal in a positive way, such as setting homework that is based around hosting and reporting a group discussion online.

If we want to see a generation of digitally ‘literate’ adults emerge in years to come, it is our responsibility to ensure it.

Last night over dinner I was asked by a prominent friend of mine if he should let his kids go on Facebook. At first, this may not appear to be such a dilemma, but when he told me why he was concerned, it was easy to understand his reasons for being so cautious.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Children should be allowed explore the world whoever they are. However, I can also see that if you are a celebrity or a billionaire, then you have a different set of concerns to us mere mortals. My advice was:

• Encourage them to create an account
• Discuss if they are also on other services such as MySpace, Bebo, etc
• Really, really only accept friends they actually know
• Learn about the privacy settings
• Set the privacy settings to the maximum
• Think very carefully about the picture you put on your profile

Encourage them to create an account

You wouldn’t want them to be cut off from the rest of their real world friends. If you exclude them from these places then you are socially inhibiting them. Remember kids wonder how we ever managed to arrange to have a life before we had instant messaging, social networks, etc.

Discuss if they are also on other services

Most adults are aware of Facebook. A lot of grown-ups are on Twitter too. Well I have some news for those who are not in the digital communications business: there are lots of other social networking websites that your kids could and probably will want to use. The same sets of principles apply to these places too.

Really, really only accept friends they actually know

We all have acquaintances. Facebook encourages one to rate oneself by how many people are our friends. This blurs the boundaries. Quite rightly I was asked at dinner for this piece of reputation management advice because of the risk of acquaintances not being friends in anyway.

I advised that the real discussion my high profile friend should have with his kids is what is a friend? Whose house do they go to? Who comes to their house? And lots of similar questions – these are are criteria for accepting people as friends for this group (and perhaps everybody else).    If you want to be a bit extreme then tell the kids not to accept any inbound request, but my view is that we’re establishing some rules about being streetwise, which frankly, everybody needs to be.   Establish this and remember because of their unique concerns it is not rude to unfriend people too.

Privacy Settings

For these Celeb kids I think that the privacy and profile settings should be set to only “friends”. It’s no fun if your friends can’t see your pictures, posts, etc, but at the risk of being boring I’ll repeat myself – only accept those people as friends who are really your friends.

These guys have very valid security concerns, so one thing that’s very important is to monitor what other people are saying about them. The notifications settings are a very useful for this on Facebook in particular. My advice was to make sure that every time my friend’s kids are tagged they get an alert. They may even want to explain to their friend that they don’t want to be tagged as they have unusual concerns about their privacy. You can also limit who sees your pictures in the settings, that should be thought about too.

And the picture

In the case of my friend he’s not as paranoid as Michael Jackson, putting blankets over his kids’ faces when appearing in public. But there is still a desire in this case to limit the kids’ exposure, so obviously you should use the privacy settings so that only friends can see your picture and your profile can’t be found in searches. My advice is to be cautious here too. All your friends can see your picture and whilst they know what you look like, why not remove the temptation to cut and paste.

What an employee posts online, even in a personal guise, can have direct implications for their employer. This is a problem that we’ve seen before, from naked policeman in public sector organisations like The Met to offensive retail staff in Currys and PC World, and it’s a problem we can expect to see time and time again unless businesses start taking a proactive approach to educating their employees about online literacy.

Following the sacking of naked bobby Malcolm Thomas, a senior Met source said on the incidence that: “Firearms officers must behave impeccably in their professional and personal life. They cannot lay themselves open to blackmail or disclose information that could put them or their colleagues at risk. Armed officers keep surveillance on terrorists and serious criminal suspects. It is not appropriate that their most personal details should be open for anyone to view.”

Employers need to be proactive in ensuring that their workforce understands the impact of their online activity not just for them, but for the wider business. To make social media work for a company, employers must:

• Discuss it; social media is about engagement so talk about it
• Introduce social media standards as part of a company code of conduct. whilst giving individuals room to communicate their ideas
• Train key members of staff as social media Tsars (perhaps with some younger staff who understand the digital landscape)
• Provide training as part of annual and introductory reviews for all staff
• Set up official social media accounts across the major platforms