Who Own’s Your Brand?
For the last two months we have been conducting a poll on how companies express their brand image. This month we release the results of our email survey on monitoring and responding to comments about companies on social networking sites. As you may know there is no shortage of ways employees can share information about their company, a competitor, client, or vendor. Sites like “http://www.jobvent.com, and “http://www.glassdoor.com, all allow people to post their confidential comments.
How accurate are these comments? Why don’t you check out these two sites and let us know what you think. Based on our limited research with two companies, polling employees and comparing this information with the details on these two sites, we found that the commentary about these two firms seems to represent the consensus of opinion from employees. This is alarming news. For company “A”, employees reported feeling marginalized, taken for granted, overlooked, and “jerked around”. For company “B”, employees reported ethical violations by middle management and sexual harassment/bullying that went unnoticed.
Our survey results were not statistically significant for the population of Fortune 1000 companies and they may represent more sophisticated companies, but the results are interesting.
1. Do you monitor social networking sites to see what is being said about your company? 85% said Yes, 15% said No.
2. Does your organization actively interact with social networking sites: 85% said Yes, 15% said No.
3. If you actively interact with social networking sites do you respond to site comments? 85% said Yes, 15% said No.
4. Do you use the comments from social networking sites to address issues in your organization? 100% said YES.
This information suggests that it might be appropriate for companies to take a longer look at social networking sites as a way to gauge employee engagement. Based on the number of comments about managers ability to engage and inspire employees this would seem to represent a fertile area of opportunity for HR professionals to get involved.
We would love to hear your comments about:
a. Is your company represented on these two sites?
b. In your opinion, is what’s being said about your company accurate?
We’ll post your responses next month.
