Recently, a local township in the Tucson, AZ area created its first social media policy. I don’t think many realized what type of change this will create between this governing body and their constitutents. More importantly, this brings up the idea of aggressively pushing the importance of social media guidelines for business, governments, and non-profits,especially after incidents involving Dominos, CBS news, and Honda in 2009.
If you are thinking or planning a foray into the social web within weeks or next year, your comapny needs to be thinking about social media guidelines or policies for your officers, and employees to follow before tweeting, answering forum questions, or engaging possible prospects. Your guidelines need to reflect your company culture as well as mirror actions presently conducted by your employees. Social media policies will not only be legal documents, but create roadmaps for education, operations, and employee conduct on the social web. A company needs to understand how many obstacles they will face. Some well known, many hidden.
12 Considerations a Company needs to consider when preparing a social media (SM)policy:
1. Establish company wide participation-Set-up an initial meeting including all the company department, foreign offices, contractors, etc. Define social media, create social media guidelines, create a timetable for completion and rollout, brainstorm, and discover all positive and negative issues that the policy will face when activated. Hold several meetings so all participants become familiar and comfortable with the new policy. If you deal with unknown issues or problems now, it won’t get you later…
2. Who will plan, operate, monitor and enforce the SM policies-Most of the time public relations/marketing, sales, IT and legal departments will be involved with these actual social media activities. Define who in each department will be involved and what activites they will be conducting. If concrete goals are in place, all customer service representatives conduct customer service activites. Sales personnel will approach possible on-line prospects when discovered. Possibly, sales, marketing, and PR will be involved in customer engagement activities together. In short, parallel corporate or field operations to your SM needs. In addition, place disciplinary measures in place if the social media guidelines are not followed. Food for thought: Do you need seperate policies for various company branches, including your foreign offices.
3. What are your goals from SM-Create and establish concrete goals. Presently not including SEO, social media activites can be tied to the following endeavors: customer service, customer engagement, sales/promotion, event management, real-time company news, project management, employee recruiting, employee retention, and emergency management. Start general then define what department(s) will do what under which endeavor. Event management could need individuals from marketing, PR, and sales. Emergency management could need the skills of company officers, customer service, and HR. Remember to adapt to the SM needs of your organization.
4. SM education and training-Whom will need to be trained, will you create avenues of ongoing SM training, and how will you determine an employee is ready to participate on-line with the general public? Consider creating an employee certification process. Also, after training have SM based employees sign a copy of the company’s SM policy.
5. SM tools-What platforms or applications will be used by the company and the employees carrying out the above activites. Your guidelines must state which SM applications or networks can be used by your employees and which cannot be used. If you wish to only use Twitter, LinkedIn, your own on-line community, and several niche communities for on-line interactions, name these places in your policy. Do name the places or communities you do not want you employees active in social media. This will be a tedious process, but will give explicity in SM content using the appropriate platforms or applications.
6. SM content-Explicity, explicity, explicity…Define the SM content your employees will be engaged in. If you want Wikis to be used for project management, say so. If you want photos to be shared and exchanged on Twitter and Facebook only, say so. If you want only customer service, customer engagement, and company news shared on Twitter, say so. You are not out to control your employees, but keep them focused of reaching your SM goals. Will you allow employees to share their user generated content or company generated content on Facebook? For each type of content from video, microblogs, or podcasts, their will be a way it could be used to build your community or establish evangelism on a niche community. Define your interactive content and where it will be used in your social media policy!
Next week, come back and see the last 6 Social Media policy considerations!
