The evergrowing expansion of social networking is begining to mean more and more to businesses both small and large.

Initially, MySpace jumpstarted the world of social networking for the web, offering a unique way to establish a personal presence online while keeping in touch with friends and family abroad. Today, social networking has exploded into a completely new era. Businesses are embracing the opportunnity to interact with consumers using interactive marketing methods to increase brand awareness, gather valuable data, promote special offers and even to obtain customer feedback. Almost everywhere you see an advertisement, you will also see an invitation to connect with the company via Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin, Flickr or YouTube. It almost seems as if overnight, every major company in the world realized the value of a 100% free method of interacting with consumers and capitalized on it.

Social Networks are an ideal way to expose your business to the world, and it's well known that there has been some self-made millionaires who owe their big break to social networking. On the other hand, there are also some businesses who've suffered catastrophic setbacks due to nothing other than social networking disasters. Since the latter is more probable, it's important that businesses know the risks and take precautionary measures to ensure the well being of their reputation. It's called a Social Networking Policy, and if you haven't heard of it, you better pay close attention.

With the popularity of social networking at an all-time high, chances are good that the majority of your employees have a myspace, facebook or twitter account (if not all 3) that they frequent. Without even realizing, employees can potentially cause negative effects on your business simply by posting a picture on their Facebook, tweeting on Twitter or using YouTube to host a video. It usually happens unintentionally, but nevertheless, it does happen often.

Take the recent example of the two Domino's Pizza employees. These two apparently thought it would be humorous to make video of themselves blowing snot onto pizza and farting on sub sandwiches before sending them out to customers. Yeah...... Bad idea.

The two claim it was only a joke and the food was never served, but the majority of YouTube viewers were disgusted and the duo were fired only hours after posting the video online. The amount of bad press that was generated towards Domino's becuase of these two employees was practically phenomenal. In fact, the media took such attention to the video, it prompted the president of Domino's USA to upload his own video to YouTube in an attempt to correct the situation and apologize for the actions of the Domino's employees.

Now, let's not assume that your employees will ever do something of this caliber. Let's assume they would never do anything even close to this, and they're far too intelligent to make a bad choice like the previous example. Even actions which are normally completely harmless can lead to negative and/or embarassing exposure for your business. Imagine a group of employees wearing company shirts who venture out after work for a few drinks. Harmless right? Of course it is...... Untill someone snaps a few pictures of the group with drinks in hand posing in an unnaceptable manner and posts it on Facebook. Next thing you know, people are labeling your company as nothing more than a bunch of alcoholic perverts simply because they were all wearing clothing that represents your business.

There are a million and one ways to get negative attention focused on your business, and the internet can be one of the easier ones. The implementation of a Social Networking Policy is an important step in awareness for both you and your employees. The policy is not a punishment to your employees, it's merely an agreement set into place by you the employer which helps to prevent embarassing or potentially worse situations for yourself, your employees and most of all, your company.