Subscriber price: $25.00, Non-subscriber price: $30.00
Estimated total study time: 25 minutes
The social-media phenomenon is revolutionizing both personal and business communications. We can now broadcast our thoughts, opinions, pictures and videos instantly through a vast array of social-media sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) to promote products and services, network, reconnect with old friends and much more. Blogs, podcasts and YouTube allow almost anyone to disseminate their views and content to the world at large. Not surprisingly, there's peril in social media's uncharted waters. Inappropriate social-media use can lead to problems of insider trading, defamation, antitrust violations and harassment, among many others. At the same time, businesses must use social media effectively to remain competitive.
A recent survey conducted by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics suggests that many employers take a reactive rather than proactive approach to managing employees' social-media use. Survey results suggested that while employers increasingly discipline employees for inappropriate social-media use, most employers monitor employees' social media use passively—i.e., only when notified of a potential issue. Some 66% of employers surveyed did not have a social-media-use-specific policy. But because both the risks and the benefits of social-media use are so great, employers cannot afford to ignore either. This course is an important component of proactively managing employees' social-media use.
This 25-minute course provides common-sense guidelines for the appropriate and responsible uses of social media—both in the workplace and in personal contexts—that could affect the employer. It includes pop quizzes, news clippings and a final quiz highlighting real-world issues that employees should learn to spot and respond to. The topics covered in the course include: