When Gary Baney decided to add a social media promotion division to his Rocky River software development firm last year, finding new clients wasn't the first thing that came to mind.
He had to make sure his employees fully understood social media ramifications.
While clients worry about making sure dates and prices are correct with social media posts that his firm handles, he wanted to make sure his company's brand and reputation were also protected.
"I don't want my CFO talking about having a tryst on the weekend on Facebook, and then in the next message mentioning that he or she works for my company," he said. "If Google indexes it, it's virtually permanent."
While some area companies are finding new business thanks to social media, attorneys and consulting firms are also getting a boost by creating social media policies.
Sharon Toerek, an attorney at Licata & Toerek, said the informal nature of social media platforms makes it critical that employees understand existing laws are just as important as company policies dictating that they shouldn't do anything to reflect negatively on a company.
"You have to make sure that employees respect copyright laws, by not pasting content that they found elsewhere without attribution," she said. "Maybe they want to blog on behalf of the company or republish a blog or tweet that someone else did. Make sure there is attribution, or in some cases permission needs to be granted."
Social media policies should also indicate that employees should not use a platform to say anything disparaging, illegal or libelous. When employees make controversial statements on blogs or social media platforms, they need to make it clear those views are personal and do not reflect their company's view.
Tom Green, an attorney at Kastner Westman & Wilkins, LLC in Akron, said most of his clients are just amending existing policies, including adding language that involves the right to reprimand employees for online conduct that impacts their business. Examples range from threatening co-workers online to endorsing products without making it clear that it's their personal views.
Green said rules and policies mean nothing if employees aren't aware of them and if they are only enforced periodically.
"If you're going to make a rule, you need to follow it," he said. "A lot of employers get in trouble when they have rules and don't follow them."
At Boundless Flight, a company that manages Web presence for more than 20 brands, Baney said he's taking the responsibility seriously. His company tweets promotional messages and manages Facebook fan pages for various firms. When he's not watching what people are saying about customers, the former college professor is often online watching out for many of his former students. He has stepped in trying to get them to eliminate damaging career comments.
Google might index a comment in a fifth of a second or in a week, he said. Once it does, the comment exists online in perpetuity.
"You may be staring at that quote for the rest of your career," Baney said.
The same thing applies to companies.
"A company's reputation is now a function of social media conversations which may never be forgotten," Baney said. "What people are saying about your company is just as important as your cash flow, your accounts receivable management and employee retention."
-- Marcia Pledger
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Drowned bunnies is freakish even on Facebook.
But that was the reality Petland faced last summer after an employee in Akron posted a photo of herself holding the wet carcasses of two rabbits she said she drowned at the store.
The national chain quickly closed the store and apologized, but the episode became a graphic example of how the explosion of social media has complicated the workplace.
Posts by employees, customers and competitors have left businesses battling to maintain their good names, protect secrets and get a full day's work out of their staffs.
"In the last couple of years, social media have embarrassed the business community like an avalanche," said Timothy Dimoff, founder and president of Akron-based SACS Consulting & Investigative Services Inc.
These days, SACS' employees spend most of their time fielding calls about security breaches, doing internal investigations and educating managers and employees about social media's effect on businesses.
Dimoff said that wasting time on the job is just one concern. A growing -- and sometimes more serious -- issue involves employee's actions on their own time that directly or indirectly affect brands and business deals.
A 22-year-old waitress in North Carolina was out of work last week after griping on her Facebook page about the $5 tip she got from a couple who sat at their table for three hours. Brixx Pizza said she violated a policy banning workers from disparaging customers and casting the restaurant in a bad light on a social network.
SACS once investigated an employee whose Facebook page showed him holding a beer in each hand while wearing a company T-shirt. Another time, the business found an excited bank employee sharing details about his work day, naming companies while bragging about work on a major finance project. His statements were construed as releasing insider trading information.
"People get excited and they talk about it. But sometimes they're talking about ideas or products that haven't even been patented or trademarked yet," Dimoff said. "They're putting out information in a very public, permanent and vast venue. And sometimes that information is objectionable to a client."
In March, Nestle's got caught off guard when environmentalists used social media to criticize the food giant's purchases of palm oil for use in KitKat candy bars and other bars.
Tens of thousands of people deluged Nestle's Facebook page after allegations that the oil was purchased from a company that cleared the rainforest, endangering orangutans. Protesters altered the company's logo to include the word "killer," posted a negative video on YouTube, and splashed it across Twitter.
Dominic Litten, leader of interactive marketing at Point to Point Inc. in Beachwood, said a lot of businesses block social media sites from workplace computers in an effort to prevent employees from using them on company time.
"A lot of companies are reactive instead of proactive. It's very easy to shut things down than it is to learn the benefits," said Litten, founder of Social Media Club-Cleveland. "Every five or six years a new technology comes out that makes businesses think it will affect employee productivity. Yet, every study I see, it appears productivity in the U.S. seems to be going up."
According to a study commissioned by IT staffing company Robert Half Technology, 54 percent of U.S. companies say they've banned workers from using social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter while on the job. The study also found that 19 percent of companies allow social media networking use only for business purposes, while 16 percent allow limited personal use.
"Whether a company has 10 employees or 2,000, they're all grappling with the same problems, just on a different scale," Litten said. "It's just a matter of how you want to manage it."
Social media specialists like Michael DeAloia of the LNE Group, a government relations and public communications firm, contend that instead of trying to stop the use of social networks, companies should focus on putting policies in place for some level of control, such as never talking about client work without prior approval.
The Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office went further than most. Sheriff Bob Reid informed employees in March that they need approval to post comments that "identify, reflect or imply" that they work for the office.
Thinsolutions, an IT service company in Lakewood, has launched a blog, a Facebook page and a Twitter account in the past four months. But first, Chief Executive Officer Michael Fischer hired a company to not only develop a social media policy but to talk to his 38-person staff about guidelines, time and reputation management.
Those measures didn't dismiss all of his concerns.
"You wonder what your employees are going to say that might not be flattering or good for your reputation. Are they going to friend our clients, but then have personal pictures that might not represent Thin Solutions well?" he said.
"I took the step of actually 'friending' each of my employees, because if we were going to do all of this online, then I want their pages to be above board," he said. "Some cleaned up their pages first before they friended me."
Katie Herbst, who manages social marketing for Westfield Insurance, one of the largest non-public companies in Ohio, said the 2,600-employee business uses four blogs, a Facebook page and two twitter accounts to expand their reach and build the brand.
The Medina County business also has social media policies and an in-house advisory committee that includes legal, security, technology and human resource professionals. They have plans to deal with various issues they might face from the public. But worrying about employees wasting time is not top of mind. Herbst said you have to take the medium out of it and deal with the issue.
"If an employee is going to waste time, they're going to do it whether its on Facebook, shopping online, playing solitaire on the computer or planning a wedding," she said. "Social media is a new medium that has to be managed like anything else."
Anthony Hughes joined Cleveland web services firm Aztek a year ago, and it didn't take long for employees at the 15-person firm to realize he spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. But instead of frowning on the behavior, they gave the salesman a nickname -- "LinkedIn Ninja."
"It's not what you know. It's who you know and who they know," said Hughes, who says when he's not working on proposals or project management, LinkedIn remains on his browser 60 percent of his day. He estimates he spends an hour to an hour and a half on the site daily.
Paul Roetzer, president of PR 20/20 in Cleveland, said he tells clients and prospective clients that social media, search engine marketing, content marketing and public relations are all integrated.
Before he meets with a client, he conducts general searches to find out how active their employees and competitors are online.
"It's not uncommon for us to discover information and mentions of their brand that they weren't even aware of, including employees participating in social media," he said. "One of the biggest concerns is that companies don't want to lose control of their brand. But it's going to happen with or without them."
He's most surprised by larger companies that choose to do business as usual without even considering the impact of social media.
"Employees, consumers, and media can be talking about the brand and executives right now," he said. "If nothing else, you have to be monitoring and be aware of what's being said."