Dilbert-Gets Social

Dilbert is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character.


Had to smile today when I saw this Dibert comic strip in Nick Pearts Blog! Nick is so right it encapsulates perfectly the way that a huge number of businesses today view social media. My role encompasses as you know social, and I encounter daily re-buffs like this.

Most businesses today know that they need to be incorporating Social Media into the way they communicate with customers and employees but are effectively paralysed from doing so due to perceived risks. The attitude of shutting out this communication channel combined with a lack of trust of employees is only going to be detrimental to an organisation’s success and corporate reputation. If you can't find a company active on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or Youtube as a consumer you question it very existence.

There are a huge range of progressive companies, Dell, BestBuy, Sophos, who are embracing social media to great benefit. Clearswift recently conducted some global research into the use of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace and almost two-thirds of companies were actively embracing them.

Confidence to use them has been bolstered by the fact that these organisations know that they need to have a security policy in place to be able to deal with them . To embrace these powerful communication mediums, companies simply need to implement simple policies, motivate their people to jump on social media, then authenticate their users and monitor content, LiveEnsure handles the authentication. (An empty facebook page, a dead twitter feed won't help any business)

Companies can in the words of the author Susan Jeffers... feel the fear and do it anyway.