Over the last 12 months there has been a significant upswing in the use of social media in our personal and professional lives. Our friends, colleagues, work mates and employees are increasingly connected via sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – and they are accessing these sites at home and at work. In line with this, the distinctions between “home” and “work” are blurring, with employees “friending” each other, photos from team building exercises appearing on Flickr or Facebook profiles and personal blogs covering professional and work-related issues.

Twelve months ago, such situations would have been considered rare. However, a recent study by Forrester indicated that only 24% of Australian adults DON’T use some form of social media. And when you add the Forrester technographics data into the mix, allowing us to analyse not just the frequency of social media usage, but the pattern of consumption, use and engagement, it is clear that personal use of technology is driving personal innovation in a manner which is only now starting to appear in corporations.

And this is where corporate social media guidelines begin to come into play.

For every hundred or so benign Facebook profiles across your organisation, there is bound to be one awkward social (or anti-social) activity that could raise issues for your business or challenges for your brands (such as the recent “fake Stephen Conroy” issue). The issue at hand is how best to determine the right social media balance between authority and responsibility, freedom and control. Well-known author, Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater discuss this challenge in this video from Picnic 08.

But rather than focusing on the negative, Shirky and Leadbeater urge us to look towards the potential of collaborative creativity. This means establishing governance processes, providing tools to support and streamline the processes and allowing your teams to experiment and learn.

But how do you take the social conversations that are occurring within and outside of your organisation and turn this into something of value to all involved parties? It’s all about striking a balance.

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