Speaking of New Year's resolutions, have you finally got around to drafting that social media policy for your employees?
If not, you're hardly alone.
A new SHRM study reveals only 40 percent of employers have a formal social media policy. Of those, a little more than half actually spell out their right to monitor employee social media usage.
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Funny thing about this survey, though, was SHRM's upbeat – if not downright giddy – tone about what I saw as a clear lack of social media awareness.
Consider that Twitter boasts more than 100 million active users, with 11 accounts coming on line every second.
Networking and job hunting site LinkedIn has 64 million professionals in the United States alone.
And the 800-pound gorilla? Well, that would be Facebook, with 800 million users worldwide – a quarter of which jumped onto the site just this past year.
All of this measures against an estimated 2012 U.S. labor force of 16.3 million.
Oddly enough, less than 45 percent of employers leave social media policies up to the human resource departments at all, according to the study, while the rest apparently leave up to the otherwise generally socially challenged IT departments.
So you'll have to forgive my overly cynical attitude this week, but social media is moving at the speed of light, and this isn't the time for employers, HR departments or even IT hacks to take things nice and slow. Those days are over, and if you can't get your head around that, then yours will be.
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