The use of social media in the workplace can make it easy for organizations to communicate with followers and patrons, but it can also swiftly expose a large number of followers to any accidental mishaps that occur in the social media feed and cause a backlash of criticism (and in some cases result in termination of the employee who creates content for the social media feed).
Increasingly, employees are also required to heavily self-censor their personal social media use or they may end up facing repercussions at work.
Examples of Social Media mishaps (many of which led to termination) within the last few years:
- http://time.com/money/3019899/10-facebook-twitter-mistakes-lost-job-millennials-viral/
- http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/being-shamed-on-social-media-should-not-get-people-fired/385597/
- http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/06/living/buzzfeed-social-media-fired/
- http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-fired-2011-5?op=1
- http://www.thestar.com/life/technology/2013/08/15/using_twitter_facebook_led_to_these_people_being_fired.html
Although many of these examples conform to the clickbait style of headline and are designed to elicit emotional responses or cater to views of their reader demographic (ex. Money’s article on ‘social media blunders that cost a millennial a job’) they bring up issues about privacy and increasingly non-existent division of work and home.
Ultimately, these stories highlight the importance of a well-crafted social media policy for libraries that is fully communicated to all librarians and staff at the library (or within the library system). Keeping personal opinions out of organizational social media and maintaining polite and inoffensive language should be obvious. However, policies should also cover things such as when employees are allowed to access the organizations social media (should they address patrons responses/posts at all hours of the day or be restricted to typical 9-5 work hours? – What should be done about the balance of work and home?) or what to do when employees violate the social media policies.
Aside from shielding the organization and employees from accidents that could cause significant problems, policies can also help make the library’s social media more useful to patrons and more efficient and effective at communicating to the library’s audience by directing content away from memes and jokes that will be ignored by patrons and toward things like hours and programs.
Other Resources
http://blog.credoreference.com/2014/06/5-mistakes-libraries-make-with-social-media/