According to Nielsen, the total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700% year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009. Strung together, those minutes translate to over 26,000 YEARS!!! SO we can safely say social media is being used and is not going away anytime soon.
Now, with all those minutes people are on the social media channels, there are going to be times when your school, company or organization comes up as a topic for discussion. It will be very important how you handle the situation. If you handle it wrong or don’t even have a policy to handle it, you could get burned and your brand reputation may suffer. United Airlines had this happen to them: United Breaks Guitars
What can you do to avoid this? Well, for one thing, make sure you have some sort of social media policy in place. Here is a great example of how IBM addresses online social policies: IBM Social Computing Guidelines
Quite frankly, it is a pretty catchy tune and next time I book my travels, I may just be humming that tune…
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The second link doesn’t go to IBM but back to the Youtube video “United Breaks Guitars” (which is catchy, yes, but I was hoping to find the IBGM policy).
Andrew, thanks for catching the link issue. It is now fixed and routing to the proper IBM site location for their policy.
Good catch, Andrew. The link has been fixed. Thank you!!
Thanks!