It wasn’t very long ago that hoardings and print advertisements were the main routes of reaching out to the market. Television ads were a big thing, and companies made money from composing jingles for the radio. Companies put up internal circulars on the office notice board, and with the advent of email, the official mail inboxes would fill up with internal circulars.

Emails, of course, were a big thing and the companies had to frame policies about employees’ rights to reach out using official email. But social media changed all that. It was such a drastic change that the line between official and personal has blurred.

Emails necessitated hard thinking about usage policy because any mail with the office ID bearing an employee’s personal view could be construed as that of the office concerned. So companies had to frame policies drawing clear boundaries about the content that could be sent from the official email ID.

If you think that only companies faced a challenge in defining the boundaries, you would be mistaken. The legal system also faced the challenge of recognizing what was official and what was not. Whether emails could be taken as official communication or any document, to be legally acceptable, had to be the old pen-and-paper stuff bearing all those parameters deemed redundant these days, became part of a big debate. When digital signatures were created, electronic communications became the thing and conventional pen-and-paper is now archaic.

But the digital space has churned up a lot more confusion, which made the email debate look like a storm in a teacup. The digital space created social media, which now covers the entire identity space of the millennial society. The ad world has taken to social media and spouts jargon that appears gibberish to someone from the last century.

Social media being interactive by default, users can voice their “likes” and “dislikes” instantaneously. Now we have long-form and short-form communication, something that would have had little meaning even a decade back. There is one constant that hasn’t changed — business strategy.

Business strategy is about relations, and relations are defined by communications or the lack of it and its effectiveness. The digital space keeps defining you every moment based on your communication. In the previous era, things were slow. For example, a company could recall internal notices, leaving no trace of it except at the gossip space around the coffee machine.

Today, there is no such reprieve. Once a company sends an email or publishes something on social media, it could go viral, and someone could capture a screenshot by the time the company withdraws it.

Managing the digital space is not easy. What an employee does in his or her digital space may also have a bearing on the company’s image. Someone makes a controversial comment on his or her social media. If the comment goes viral for the wrong reasons, people can quickly link it with their employer.

Or a person comments on social media on an internal decision of his employee. People will quickly connect one of the engagements from the employee’s personal space as a challenge to that decision, and all hell may break loose. Here the personal spills over to the official space, and containing that becomes an important part of the business strategy.

Every nut, bolt and screw of business is about this—starting from the balance sheet to product design and marketing. Social media has changed the entire landscape of business strategy, making it more complex and interesting for a strategist. And for employees too, as they have to firewall their personal digital space so that there is no spillover into the official!