If Social Media is keeping you up at night, relax-- You've just been there before.

(As we approach ERE's SM summit for what I'm sure will be an valuable day of conversation, I thought this commentary from our November CareerXroads Update might be interesting.)

In 1996, just 13 years ago, the Internet was at a tipping point - not so new that we couldn't see its promise but also not so accepted that we couldn't imagine its dangers.

As the debate raged on, the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) and the Society of Human Resource Development (SHRM) conducted a broad-based survey of several thousand firms to give the hype a dose of reality with a few facts by asking how firms were developing "policy" to guide their employee's use of it.

The report, published in BNA's January 2, 1997, Bulletin to Management, concluded that "Internet access is typically confined to a small proportion of the workforce."

• 41% of the respondents allowed only a "few" of their employee's use of email

• 54% gave a "few" employees access to other applications

• Only 10% allowed ALL employees full access to email and the Internet. "Many of these organizations require(d) employees to demonstrate a legitimate business need before they [were] granted Internet access"

• Formal written policies were rare with just 5% of the surveyed organizations reporting that they had developed written policies to govern employees' Internet activities.

• Access to the Internet differed significantly depending on what Industry you were in. While 90% of educational institutions had established internet access, only 25% of the banks and 17% of Utilities had done so in 1996.

• The recognition of the Internet as a business communication tool was not yet accepted. 60% of those with email (i.e. 24% of total respondents) used it to communicate with colleagues. Nearly half of those with email (i.e. 20% of respondents) used it for promotion and advertising.

• Websites were not yet the critical window they are today. Only 24% of the respondents had a website. For firms with 1000 or more workers, the figure rose to 60%. The sites were mostly ads, jobs and profiles of the organization.)

Thirteen years later, Social Media, rather than the Internet as a whole, are now at the center of the debate. But, the questions and answers are more than vaguely familiar.

(In fact, Mark dug out the report quoted above because the data we were analyzing last week seemed so much like what we had seen before.)

We conducted a quick, informal survey of large, highly-competitive firms (5000 or more employees) in the last two weeks at the request of a Colloquium member to specifically benchmark sm policy development and we were not surprised to see that nearly 100% of the firms invited to respond did so -- in just 72 hours.

We are reviewed the results with those contributing to them today and will likely publish some of our findings in future whitepapers.

However, there are a couple interesting notes (or side-notes) worth mentioning:

• 44% of current respondents do NOT have any policy governing Social Media usage

• 58.5% of those with policies first wrote or revised them in the last 6 months

• Policies were most likely written by Legal (35%), violations handled by HR (43.9%) or legal (39.4%), audits are mostly performed by Legal (41.9%); employees are informed about SM by Communications (39.7) rather than HR (8.1%).

• Less than half the firms surveyed (47.8%) have even attempted to put together Corporate, multi- discipline task forces to oversee Social Media policies but even those who have them aren't sure who is leading

• 6% have developed a "Community Manager" role to engage the firm in developing a deeper business understanding for how SM could contribute In the end we'll work it out.

As SM is shown to contribute to business solutions, and we are sure it will, the defensiveness will tail off and the challenges around who is its champion will resolve themselves. For the moment though, the half full crowd is still trying to convince the half-empty crowd.