Because I am immersed in the social web and am reading, learning, contributing and conversing with others on my Blog, Tweeter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr, YouTube, Friendfeed, etc., it is easy to forget that for  many small business owners social networking is still a very scary proposition. Change is always scary.

Several weeks ago I received this email from an insurance agency principle.

This Facebook thing just came up in our office and without doing some research on it we reprimanded an employee for using it during work hours.  Our “young” CSR told me she had done a couple quotes over it and that another customer contacts her through her yahoo account.  Anyway, even though we reprimanded her she is persistent in telling me that she wants to put some sort of an ad or a bulletin board or something on Facebook and feels she can market from it as well as service customers.  I’m inclined to think she has something here but my partner and office manager I’m sure we will be pessimistic.  Please help me understand and explain how we might be able to use something like this without turning our people loose to waste time doing personal business on it?

A couple of days ago a marketing person from a insurance agency sent me an email he received from the owner of the agency.

I noticed a change this morning to the web site – and maybe we are just testing it, but I wanted to let you know we should not have the “Share On LinkedIn” and “Share On Facebook” tags on our corporate web site.  We are still debating whether we will be allowing staff to go to these sites…..

Real or perceived concerns, rationalizations, excuses – does it matter? There is still a lot of resistance to change and it takes courage and sometimes a leap of faith to experiment with new ways of doing business.  The societal and business trends being fueled by the social web are hard trends. So, is not so much a matter of if you are going to be using social networking but rather when.

Please add a comment and tell us how is your agency or company responding to and/or addressing the issue of  social networking? Also, please take the quick poll “Does your company allow employees access to social networking sites?”

Another article you might enjoy: “Are You Saying This?”

Photo Credit: Flickr Playingwithbrushes

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