Do You Know What Your Employees Are Saying About You?

On Friday I was researching Twitter accounts for major brands, and I came across an account for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. The profile name is Rent A Car and the URL is @enterpriserent, so upon first glance it seems as if the account is legit. However, when you look at the actual bio and content for the account, you quickly see that it’s operated by an Enterprise employee and isn’t actually the brand’s official Twitter account. Worse yet is that the employee doesn’t have great things to say about the company or its customers.

The bio’s already not off to a great start by calling Enterprise customers “retarded.” While the account has less than 200 followers, people can still come across the profile via search or links and mistakenly assume that it’s the brand’s main account. The tweets make for a bit of a reputation management headache:

Complaining about your job and using profanity from a branded Twitter account doesn’t really ooze professionalism. Thankfully, the account doesn’t seem very active — its last update was from last April, so Enterprise should contact Twitter with a trademark claim to gain control of the account and turn it into a more appropriate company profile.

The main problem here is that Enterprise didn’t register its brand name in the first place. If I were them, I’d have snatched up @enterpriserent and variations of the brand name so nobody else could use them. They don’t even have to use the accounts, although they should probably have some sort of presence on Twitter, seeing as how they could reach a wide audience as well as deal with any reputation management/customer service issues like the one below:

Companies really need to be proactive and make sure that they’re in control of their brand whenever possible, and right now a big part of that is registering their brand names on major social media sites (KnowEm is a great service for helping out with that).

Another problem is that Enterprise wasn’t aware of what its employee was saying about them online. A few months ago I blogged about why companies shouldn’t block social media in the workplace, but I added this part:

Obviously, there are some downsides to letting employees have full reign of social media usage at work. I’ve seen people update their Facebook status complaining about a work task or saying negative things about customers/clients. This sort of behavior is clearly unprofessional and doesn’t reflect well on either the employee or the business. However, I think that a little bit of training and awareness can stifle these sorts of incidents. Clearly state your social media usage policy to new employees and say that while you encourage responsible and occasional usage of social media and networking, be courteous, professional and mindful of the company who’s employing them.

A good company policy upon hiring new employees is to provide a handbook that covers social media guidelines. At the very least, include a “public mentions” policy in their contract — after all, it’s reasonable to expect an employee of your company to refrain from publicly complaining about his employer or customers or painting them in a negative light. From there, keep tabs on your employees. I’m not saying you should spy on them; just be aware of their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. accounts and see if they have a personal blog. Know what’s reasonable (e.g., “Frustrating day at work today”) and what’s over the line (“I hate my stupid boss so much! Dealt with stupid customers all day because he wasn’t around to help! XYZ Company is the absolute WORST!”), and put out any fires as soon as possible (have a chat with your employee and outline your company policy, issue a warning, escalate the repercussions from there).

What about if you don’t know that your employee registered an anonymous blog or Twitter account? Well, in that case brand mentions and monitoring play a key role. Keep track of brand mentions to see what people are saying about you. If you notice a Twitter account pop up that’s authored by an employee of your company, you can try and file a trademark claim or at least combat any negative content that comes from the account with public statements from your official account. Even if there’s not much you can do, you can at least be aware of the account so you can intercept people who may confuse it for the real deal.

In any case, Enterprise has a lot of opportunities here, and I hope they do something to address the account and are more aware moving forward. Other companies should take notice and realize that as social media grows more and more powerful, they’re going to have to expand their branding as well as adapt how they’re monitoring their brand and their employees.