We've had a number of clients discussing the merits of anonymous posting with us. Some feel it's the only way to generate significant activity on their ESM environment. Our feeling is that the desire to have anonymous posting can be seen as an indicator of the organisations openness and honesty and its willingness to address controversial issues. We can only think of one situation in which we would advise anonymous posting. However, we'd like to open this issue up to a wider debate and get others to share their experience and views.
One of the major resistances that we hear from people who are just getting into social media is that they are afraid that they will be persecuted ("it's not good for my career") if they post what they feel. And that's a very real fear. If you allow people to hide behind a different or anonymous persona, the theory goes that they will feel 'safer' from the repercussions of a controversial post. They can say anything they want, because no one is going to challenge them directly, although they may do so anonymously.
We have little direct evidence, however, of people whose career has suffered because they have posted something in an ESM environment that is honest, truthful, but controversial. We do have evidence of people whose careers have benefited from their open and candid participation, but only because they have been willing to take on and follow through with the consequences of their post.
In our experience, when you allow people to post anonymously, they will be significantly more critical as they do not have to take responsibility for what they are saying, nor cope with the consequences. This can lead to some difficult situations where it's difficult to get to the core of the issue because of the post is anonymous and so it remains an issue.
The evidence thus seems to be against anonymous posting. However, because a rational explanation will not take away the fear, you could still argue that by allowing anonymous posting you will get more people to participate. This reasoning doesn't diagnose the right problem. It's not your ESM initiative that isn't working, it's your company that's sick. Re-establishing bad working practices and embed counter productive cultural values in a tool that has at its heart transparency of communication and engagement will not get you anywhere. Your focus should be with fixing the trust in your company first.
And it is with the exercise of fixing the company that we define the only exception to our 'never anonymous rule'. To 'lance the boil' you can run a challenge where you ask everyone to input the things that should be changed in the organisation. In a short period of time people get the chance to surface all the problems they see without having to fear any repercussions. Once that's done you go into productive future focused mode and collaborate constructively and not anonymously on developing a shared plans to deal with the issues you have identified.
