I’ve been banging on lately about how good social media is for your company and your brand and how it could potentially rocket your income if used correctly.

However, recently there have been a number of cases where social media has been absolutely terrible for a company, to the point where they’ve lost customers and it’s all gone very pear-shaped.

The most recent case is Domino’s pizza where a couple of employees decided to film themselves making a (cough) bogy sandwich with a nice voice over explaining what they were up to. Now, this video was nice and safe on their phone but due to, I dunno, maybe an amazing bout of stupidity, they decided to publish it on t’interweb.

I mean, nobody would see it. Would they?

Turns out over a million people did and this got back to the bosses at Domino’s and all hell broke loose.

Not only that, the Fed is now investigating the hapless idiots and they’re facing charges for supplying food unfit for consumption. They’ll no-doubt be regretting their little prank.

So what’s the lesson to be taken here? Should we ban the use of social media in our companies just because some stupid employees may decide to sneeze in the food we serve and post it online? Should we ban facebook in case a work experience placement photocopies his/her bottom and pops it on their homepage.

Banning the use of such system is ham-fisted and not the way to stop it happening. If I had a grievance about a company and I couldn’t post it at work, I’d do it from my phone or wait until I got home to do it. If I’m going to do it, I’ll do it and you can’t stop me (rasssssp!!!)

So, you need to make your company socially aware and not just hide away. Promote yourself properly to your staff, to your customers and with your online services and everything will be just fine. Try to avoid the issue by banning its use and you may find yourself getting bad publicity anyway. The Internet has no walls and no borders, it’s just there for everyone to use.

Fear is no excuse, embrace it.