In a few short years, companies have gone from seeing social media as a danger to be avoided to training employees to be social media brand ambassadors.
Social media usage is now ubiquitous outside and inside companies Regardless of our age or generational cohort, we are now all digital citizens.
Let’s take the case of MasterCard , Five years ago,MasterCard saw social media usage in the workplace as a possible security threat to the organization. As a public company in the financial services sector, there was a tacit understanding among employees that they were not allowed to talk about the company on their personal social media sites or twitter handles.
Added to this, MasterCard managers were reluctant to use social media inside the company for fear of inadvertently sharing confidential information. But as the employee demographics of the organizations grew younger, a growing number of MasterCard employees expected to navigate the workplace as easily and seamlessly as ordering food from Seamless, a taxi fromUber or a book from Amazon.
Then in 2009, MasterCard CEO challenged the entire company to transform from a 45-year-old B2B financial services company into a more consumer-focused payments technology company. And one way to do this was to infuse social and digital media into the organization so each MasterCard employee could be excited about being a brand ambassador forMasterCard. So the question was how to do this in a way that brought the entire organization focused around this shared vision?
