This interesting tweet appeared on my timeline this morning: “I just unfollowed someone for making a horrible comment about his own customers”. And it sums up the most obvious issue in using social networks: the fact that personal and business will at some point, coalesce and overlap.

Plenty has been written about the obvious ‘rogue’ employees and social faux pas:  most companies know that they have to include some guidelines now about ‘correct’ use of social media, but how do we deal with the blurring of boundaries? What happens when you want to encourage your employees to live the brand in another channel, but want to mitigate the risks of the reach of social media.

Asking our staff to live the brand beyond the working day isn’t anything new. Great companies become that way because everyone working for them wants to shout the fact from the rooftops and be able to explain why that business is just so great. Now we have to provide some suggestions as to how best to do that in social, so that everyone enjoys and benefits from the experience. Oh and so that the ‘brand police’ don’t get so edgy that they produce a law book that makes the Stasi seem libertarian.

So, here’s our six simple Ideas to sensible social brand use so that employees don’t feel restricted but brands stay safe.

1) Induction. Every employee induction programme now needs to include social media use. This is where those horror stories can hit home very effectively – just realising that even a harmless remark that might be forgotten about if mentioned briefly in the pub, will be seen by potentially millions if it’s put on Twitter.  But that there’s also a positive side. Saying that you’re thrilled you’ve just won a great new client is going to generate warm fuzziness across the network.

2) Identity. Once upon a time the company pin was the way to show your brand with pride. In Silicon Valley-like businesses, polo-shirts, baseball caps and other paraphernalia marked someone as being part of that business. Now you have social media. If you think of your presence on social channels as being like walking down the High Street and then realise you did it with your company badge on, you get more understanding of why you are always at some point representing your business. You might want to introduce company twibbons to become the 21st century version of the pin. If you’re doing the right thing with your employees and making them brand-proud the uptake of this might be a good indicator. And the presence of this might remind someone before committing that faux pas.

3) Incentive. Regardless of the sensible aspects of asking staff to embrace the business, there is always going to be a ‘why should I’ element? Even the most committed employee might think that acting as promoters of the brand through social could be seen as a bit cheeky. It’s almost like asking them to parade down Oxford Street with a sandwich board. So if you’re hoping to bring every staff member into your social channels make sure you have good reasons. It may not be as obvious as the person who gets the most retweets wins a prize, but some ways of recognising that everyone is contributing to the cause will make your social channels work harder. The CEO of Redgate Software welcomes and lists employees as they join Twitter – really creating that social community and obviously not doing them any harm as they’re the best small software company in the UK to work for.

4) Individuality. One of the classic ways to deal with the social media stranger danger has been to keep everything very separate. How many people do you know who’ve deliberately refused to ‘friend’ colleagues so that they can say just what they want about work on Facebook? But perhaps that reflects more on the brand than on the individual. If someone feels the need to keep everything very separate they may not be a very chirpy employee. Or they may be very protective of their personal life and worried that the hen-night photo might reflect badly on them at work. This is where a company’s social media policies really reflect their overall HR intentions. Companies need to recognise that if they want to use their employees as brand channels then they need to exercise a little flexibility in some of the user-generated content – otherwise they’re going to end up with the automaton approach. People develop multiple accounts and the personality that drives social media will be absent, and the brand will have less impact.

5) Interest. Make sure that you create content that your staff will actually want to share. It should follow all the best social media rules of being engaging, intriguing, entertaining and easy to pass on. If you only deliver corporate CEO messages you’re unlikely to find that people are going to pop them on their FB pages. But lively, frequently-changing content can  take your brand into the very personal networks that people manage in social channels. “Look at the great company I work for!” It’s also important that you understand basic social media rules here: create the hashtags; make your links easy to use; have clear corporate social channels; make sure your company Twitter account follows all staff and publicise resulting lists – it’s a great way to show that everyone is part of the business.

6) Impact. Once again we return to the holy grail of monitoring ROI and other ways of measuring social media. Unfortunately when looking at how employees might use social media to help out the brand it’s easy to quantify the effects of a resulting crisis rather than the positive but softer outcomes. But look at introducing KPIs. Serena Software was one of the first companies to utilise Facebook as a social intranet for its staff. It saw benefits in improved communication and sharing of information. More widespread uptake of social means that we should start to monitor more. So compare retention rates before and after bringing everyone to the table. See if a sales lead came through an individual account. Get people involved once you know how you’re going to count, compare and contrast.

These are some starting ideas to get away from fearing the consequences of social media use by staff and embracing its positive impact. But in the end a business has to decide whether it wants to be rigid and risk not having any employee wanting to take part, or open with some sensible advice so that each employee does open up their business to their personal networks with minimal risk and maximum effort. If you’d like some help in getting these initiatives running why not submit a brief?