12. Remedy Your Fears with Sound Policy
This chapter is all about establishing a sound, easy-to-follow social media policy that lets your employees use social media to reach your customers, but, at the same time, keeps them from engaging in inappropriate behavior, visiting inappropriate sites, and not representing your company or brand in the best possible light.
Many companies have created a social media policy to deal with how they will respond to customers via social media, what kinds of communicating they will do in social media, and which employees are allowed to use it and what they are allowed to do and not do. These companies include the BBC, Dell, the Washington Post, the New Zealand State Services Commission, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.1 Several social media practitioners, such as Dave Fleet, document these policies and write frequently about them (see Figure 12.1).
Figure 12.1. Social media professional Dave Fleet writes about the need for and creation of corporate social media policies. They’re important tools that can save you a lot of time and headaches in the future.
Obviously, these companies have recognized the need for a social media policy. They are embracing the opportunities the social web offers companies. These organizations recognize the power of allowing employees the freedom to interact with customers but also give the employees a framework to guide those interactions.
Why Do We Need a Social Media Policy?
In short, you need a social media policy to protect yourself, regardless of your company’s size or how comfortable you are with employees operating as extensions of your brand. Chances are, you already have other policies that guide employee behavior. There are policies about sick days and personal days, workplace attire, and workplace safety. There also needs to be a policy about how your company communicates with the outside world.
Maybe your policy is that no one outside the social media practitioners may use social networking on behalf of the company (see Chapter 14, “This Is NOT a Sandbox. It’s a Business,” for more on who should be involved in your social media efforts). Maybe your policy requires that everyone can communicate on behalf of the company using social media, but needs to go through a special certification and training course first. And maybe you want to take the Zappos approach to social media and let everyone in the company talk about whatever is on their mind. If you work for a small company and you can trust everyone to do and say the right thing, that’s great. But if you work for a larger company whose employees don’t know each other, you can run into all kinds of problems where different messages and answers get sent out to customers, internal discussions are taken out into the general stream, and people may even inadvertently send out information they weren’t supposed to.
In November 2010, National Hockey League general managers (GMs) were feeling their way around Twitter and Facebook, figuring out what they wanted their players to be able to send out to their fans and followers. During a GM meeting, they were discussing their concerns about what to do with Twitter and applying policies around the social network because their players were tweeting inappropriate comments or even giving away team information. Washington Capitals’ GM George McPhee told USA Today that a couple of years before, one of their players tweeted that he wasn’t going to dress that night, which gave their opponent the jump on knowing the Capitals’ lineup.
Although knowing whether someone is playing in a game that night might not seem like such a big deal, sending out proprietary business information that’s worth millions or billions of dollars is. Although a spat between two players that gets aired right before game time might not seem so important, an inappropriate or outrageous tweet from someone’s personal account could result in damage to the employer’s brand, especially if that person is closely associated with that brand.
The NHL is still struggling with its own social media policy, while other professional sports leagues deal with it, too. With specific focus on Twitter, the National Basketball Association (NBA) doesn’t allow players to tweet during a game (see Figure 12.2 for the kinds of tweets NBA players are likely to send out after a game), the National Football League (NFL) requires players to stop tweeting 90 minutes before game time, and Major League Baseball bars tweeting by players and managers 30 minutes before a game starts. This year, Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended after he tweeted an angry response to a bad call during a game against the New York Yankees on April 27 (see Figure 12.3).
Figure 12.2. Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks sends out tweets before and after most games. The NBA doesn’t allow players to tweet during games.
Figure 12.3. Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for two games after he tweeted during a game against the New York Yankees on April 27. Major League Baseball bars tweeting by players and managers 30 minutes before a game starts.
Right after Super Bowl XLIV (the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31 to 17), one Indianapolis PR “professional” sent out a rather denigrating tweet about New Orleans and their “flooded shit hole of a city” (see Figure 12.4). The uproar that followed over the next 48 hours nearly cost this person her job and helped contribute to a major exodus of clients from her agency. The day after the tweet in question, her employer fielded phone calls from angry clients and angry tweets from Indianapolis and New Orleans demanding that the woman be fired. She blogged and tweeted an apology to the people of New Orleans and Indianapolis, but her original tweet and the resulting backlash reinforced for a lot of companies why they needed a social media policy at all. Unfortunately, for some companies, this uproar might have stopped them from joining the world of social media in the first place.
Figure 12.4. One Indianapolis PR professional angered a lot of people when she sent an insulting tweet after the New Orleans Saints won Super Bowl XLIV. The fallout caused her and her employer a lot of grief and reminded people that you’re always “on” when you’re on social media, even on a personal account.
We’re not advocating that you avoid using social media because one rogue employee decides to tweet out something hateful and nasty. Rather, create a social media policy that establishes guidelines for how employees can use and enjoy social media. And spell out the consequences for moving beyond those guidelines.
Several companies have already begun spelling out what they expect of their employees and how they should view their online communications. The United Kingdom government’s “Twitter Strategy for Government Departments” says “while tweets may occasionally be ‘fun,’ we should ensure we can defend their relation back to Our objectives.”2 SHIFT Communications, a PR firm, says their employees shall “(p)ost meaningful, respectful comments—in other words, please, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.”3 And the Washington Post’s social media policy reminds its writers that by being journalists, they “relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.”4
Similarly, the Post takes one of the best approaches to making sure its social media strategy lines up with its day-to-day mission of being a top-notch newspaper.
“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.”5
A social media policy like this might have helped the Indianapolis PR professional understand what kind of effect an inflammatory tweet like hers would have had, even if she were tweeting as a private citizen. Because her name had already been linked to her employer’s—she even had it in her Twitter bio—the policy would have spelled out what was considered appropriate and inappropriate, as well as what happens when people violate the policy.
Although none of the organizations we’ve mentioned here discuss what will happen to people who break any of the guidelines, Dell is a little more specific in what will happen if people violate its policies.
“You will be held accountable for the information You share in online activities. Be careful what You share, publish, post, or otherwise disclose. You are personally responsible for what You share and should remember that anything You post may be public for an indefinite period of time (even if You attempt to modify or delete). Try to ensure Your online communications reflect Dell’s brand attributes of openness, responsiveness, integrity and optimism.”
Dell didn’t specify what will happen, but its policy does remind employees that they themselves, and not Dell, are personally responsible for what they publish. They also remind people that their messages are public for an indefinite period of time.
The Question of Ownership
Who owns your content? That is, if an employee sends a tweet or writes a blog post for your company on company accounts, who owns it? Your company does. This is true of any work that any employee generates, whether it’s an engineering technical manual for your latest widget, a brochure about why every household needs the widget, and even the press releases that are sent out announcing the widget. Because social media is just one more written channel in this instance, anything created on the company’s social media channels is also the property of the company.
This also means that the company blog posts your employees write, the company tweets they send, and the websites they design are all owned by the company. Their names may be listed as authors, but that doesn’t mean the content belongs to the employee. However, they should be allowed to use these posts and examples as part of their professional portfolios, although they wouldn’t be able to use that material for another company.
In a similar vein, some companies have taken to deleting old blog posts whenever the author leaves the company. We recommend against doing this for a number of reasons:
• It seems petty, like you’re not willing to admit the author worked there or you’re trying to erase all traces of her existence.
• The search engines already know the information is there, and you’re getting a lot of benefit by having this content on your website or blog. Deleting the content eliminates any search engine benefits you were getting.
• Their posts contain valuable information that is still useful. Presumably you hired this person because he is smart. Just because he is no longer there doesn’t mean the information is now invalid or not worthy of your server space.
What Can Employees Do at Home?
Your company’s comfort with employees having permission and access to social media gets a little stickier if you allow your employees to associate their place of employment with their personal social media accounts or allow them to communicate through them for work purposes. Of course, even if your company doesn’t participate in social media, that doesn’t mean your employees aren’t using it at home after work hours, and you certainly can’t—in most cases—tell them what they can or cannot post on their personal accounts.
But if you communicate openly with your employees that they are allowed to utilize social media accounts and acknowledge their place of employment or communicate through them for work purposes, then you have the right to apply some company policies and expectations for their behavior there. In exchange for the privilege of talking openly as an employee of the company, the employee must surrender his full freedoms to post whatever he wants. That type of approach works well with many existing policies we’ve written and reviewed.
Depending on the type of industry and its various regulatory or governing bodies, however, a company must be aware that the courts are often ruling on behalf of the employee. In fact, one woman, Dawnmarie Souza, successfully won a suit filed on her behalf by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against ambulance company American Medical Response of Connecticut, Inc. Souza was fired for posting critical comments on Facebook about her boss. The company had an Internet policy that prevented workers from disparaging the company or its supervisors in a blog or other social network. The judgment led the company to agree to change that policy, as well as another policy that prohibited its employees from depicting the company online at all.6 The NLRB said that both of these policies violated legal protections that allow workers to talk about their salary, working hours, and working conditions with co-workers.
However, this does not mean that employees can discuss private or secret information, such as patients’ private information, proprietary company information, or trade secrets. Even if you do not have a corporate social media presence and policy, it’s at least a good idea to address these issues in the company handbook. This brings to mind a valid point. If you have a company handbook, ethics policy, or other document that governs employee behavior, often the simple way to add a social media policy is to review those documents and add the words “and online” in strategic places. Communicating on social media channels is no different than communicating over the telephone or talking to someone in person. If you’re in a highly regulated industry and have a policy that employees are not allowed to divulge private client information to anyone, then they’re not allowed to do that on- or offline. The Internet does not make the rules go away. Just clarify the fact that the policies you already have apply in the online world as well, and you’ll probably be just as risk-averse as you were before social media was a factor.
Telecommuting Is Not the Same as Personal Networking
It’s worth mentioning that an employee who works from home and uses social media as part of his job responsibilities should be covered under your social media policy. This is completely different from an employee who communicates from home during personal time. Your social media policy can cover what employees say or do during their work hours, even when they’re working at home or another offsite location.
It’s up to you whether you allow people to update their personal social networks from work, during work hours, even if they’re using personal phones on their own time to do so. We generally favor that employees who get breaks and lunches be allowed to update their networks, whether it’s from their workstations or their smartphones.
What Should a Social Media Policy Include
The best way to tell you what social media policies should include is to tell you what they should not include. This is not the place to start your employee code of conduct or employee manual. Don’t start including an entire code of conduct that each employee is supposed to follow. You should already have one of those. If you don’t, hire an HR consultant to write one for you. Similarly, if any policies or codes of conduct already exist elsewhere, and you still feel the need to explain a specific social media policy, then simply reference the existing policies in your new one.
Now, the hard part: What should your policy contain? There are two basic ways you can approach this, and we favor one over the other. One option is to write the entire policy up front, dealing with as many contingencies as possible as generally as possible. Don’t write a rule or process for every single social network, every possible type of interaction you have with customers, and the types of things you are allowed or not allowed to say. Rather, leave it as general as possible, referring to “social media” and understand that it means any and all social networks and blogging.
However, keep in mind that this approach is going to take a very long time because you’re going to have people who want the policy to cover every eventuality for every possible usage—both current and future—of social media. The problem is that typically people who undertake this kind of approach (1) don’t know very much about social media, so they get bogged down in trying to figure out how it works and create rules that don’t even apply, and (2) don’t really understand how their co-workers are going to use social media, so they may end up creating rules that will never apply or will completely run counter to the reason you need to be on social media in the first place.
The best practice is to create an overall code of conduct that tells employees what sorts of behavior you expect from them and what kinds of things they are allowed to say and share and what kinds of things they need to keep secret or not say. Next, create different policies (or sections) that deal with different facets of social networking.
Remember Erik’s friend who works at a university where they’ve been debating using social media for six months? This is the part that’s taking so long; they haven’t even created a single account on a single network, but they’ve managed to spend six months creating rules on how they’re going to use it.
In May 2010, Jason was interviewed by Inc. Magazine about some items to include when creating a general social media policy. Even though he recommends that you create individual policies that deal with major social networking tools, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging, the policy should evolve based on need and use, rather than remain a static set of arbitrary rules that your committee will debate and argue over for months that never actually come into play. You’ll find that the three-week argument about Yandex, the Russian search engine, will prove to be moot, as no one in your company will ever use it.
The best approach is to create your overall code of online conduct, and then add new sections or specific policies as the need arises. Base your policies on need and actual usage; don’t write them well in advance to cover that one instance that might or might not ever happen. Remember, if you do it right, your code of online conduct should cover the overall best practices of online communication without getting into the fine details of each and every network. This is helpful because you’re trying to govern employee communications, not the technological aspects of a certain platform.
Finally, as the need arises, create separate policies (or sections) on both the personal and company usage of
• Blogs and blog commenting
• YouTube
But don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the fine details about how each tool should work. They change frequently, and you would have to have someone who is constantly updating each tool. Rather, they should focus on best practices and general guidelines, just like the online code of conduct. An example of a good policy statement might be the following:
• When posting real-time updates about company news, be sure the news has been announced and permission to post has been granted by the communications department.
An example of what we wouldn’t want you to waste time writing is
• Do not tag the company in personal Facebook photos.
Instead, write a general policy such as, “When posting images or information of a personal nature, please refrain from incorporating the company into the messaging.”
Your policies do need to include information about how, or even whether, employees may represent the company on their personal networks. For example, even if it’s with the best of intentions, if an employee of a large fast-food chain responded to allegations of animal cruelty or poor hygiene, his response might be seen as an official statement on behalf of the entire corporation, even though he’s the assistant fry cook at the Duluth, Minnesota, restaurant.
Your social media policy also needs to
• Be positive and proscriptive. Focus on what employees can do, instead of being negative and restrictive, detailing everything employees can’t do. That doesn’t mean you can’t have anything negative in it, but the overall tone needs to be positive.
• Discuss consequences for violations. People have been fired for things they said on social media channels, regardless of how ill-advised the firing might have been. People have been fired for writing about their personal interests and hobbies outside of work, which is none of their employers’ concern. Similarly, people have been fired for sharing information they shouldn’t have, which is their employer’s concern. In nearly every case, these firings have been a complete surprise to the people who were fired. Your social media policy needs to avoid any confusion and surprise by stating up front what will happen if policies are violated.
• Remind people to be authentic. We’ve talked about authenticity throughout this book. Employees should not, even if they are trying to help the company, hide their identity, their name, or their relationship. They need to state who they are and where they work. People should also state that their messages are their own viewpoints and not those of their employer.
• Encourage people to be on their best behavior. You know how you would react if an employee made racist or sexist comments in the workplace. You should apply those same standards to their online behavior as well. Although your employee doesn’t speak for the company, the association with your company can make you look bad if your employees are making racist, sexist, or other disparaging or mean comments online. Remember the Indianapolis PR pro who made the statement about New Orleans after Super Bowl XLIV? Although she was communicating on her own time with her own Twitter account, plenty of clients, as well as members of the general public, saw her employer whenever they saw her. Encourage employees to use their best judgment.
• Remind people to do their jobs. Communicating with customers is great, but if it’s not in the person’s primary job description, then she’s not getting her work done. For example, answering customer technical questions and complaints is important, but the PR person should not spend the bulk of her time doing it. She either needs to turn it over to the customer service department, or she needs to stop doing it. (And if there isn’t anyone who can handle technical questions and complaints online, then get one. This is a symptom of a bigger problem.)
• Remind people to maintain privacy. Even if you don’t work in an industry that has strict privacy rules—Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), attorney-client privilege, investor information for publicly traded companies—you should honor the privacy of your customers or the regulatory requirements. Never discuss specific customers, never share their problems or questions, and definitely don’t link to them unless you have their permission.
• Spell out who is responsible for making final decisions about issues that have not been covered. This needs to be someone who is already familiar with social media and understands the marketing and customer communication very well. That means it either needs to be someone in one of the four departments we’ve already discussed—marketing, PR, sales, or customer service—or someone who is in charge of the social media department.
What Should You Do About Privileged Information and Avoiding Giving Advice?
The fear of violating privileged information is the one reason most businesses, especially regulated ones, stay out of social media. Your social media policy needs to address what is considered privileged information or professional advice (something doctors and lawyers can’t just give willy-nilly), and what things you can and cannot discuss on a social network. For example:
• A customer complains on a hospital’s Facebook page about his treatment or bill. It is not acceptable to address the matter on Facebook, the same way a cable TV company might because a response essentially confirms that the person was a patient. Instead, write a response that says, “I’m sorry, we can’t answer any questions on Facebook because of privacy. I realize it’s inconvenient, but could you call our main number and explain your situation? They will be able to connect you with the right department.”
• Someone writes a comment to a Facebook page with a legal or medical problem. In about 200 words, they ask you a basic question, and you are 99% certain you could solve her problem in about 200 words in return. The problem is, your professional ethics forbids this kind of behavior. You need to honor that and say, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that question directly. I don’t have enough information to give you the best answer, and don’t want to give you the wrong answer. You could make an appointment to see me, and I can help you.”
• A relative of a patient or client sends you a message on Facebook mail, asking about his relative’s case. This one is a no-brainer: You can’t share any information over the phone (unless you’ve been given specific permission from the patient/client) and definitely not by email, Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, sky writing, the Pony Express, or interpretive dance. It does not matter what channel, you just can’t do it. A simple, “I’m sorry, I’m not able to discuss that,” will do.
Now, one thing you can do is discuss hypothetical situations as educational blog posts, for example. We once worked together for a legal client who wanted help with his blogging. They wrote blog posts that were common questions people might search for, thus helping this attorney to be viewed as an expert by his potential clients. Many of these posts were answers to frequently asked questions, and even similar to cases he handled on a regular basis. But they were always written as generically as possible. They always included a disclaimer that this was not legal advice, and that if the reader needed further information, he or she should contact an attorney.
With this kind of social media, you can never name names or even discuss specific situations, but the lessons people could learn can be valuable. Just make sure to remove any identifying information, and you can avoid violating any kind of privilege. Of course, finding the best people to handle this kind of responsibility is something you need to take seriously.
Trust Employees, but Not Everyone Should Speak for the Company
We know, we know. We’ve said several times before that you need to trust your employees and that if you don’t have any employees you can trust, you have a hiring and management problem. We said you need to be able to trust your employees to talk with your customers because they will be the best evangelists for your company and can put a human face on your corporation.
But there will be some employees who, let’s face it, just shouldn’t speak to the public. They might be good at their job, can manage the internal processes extremely well, but when it comes to letting them be the face of your company, they are at the very bottom of the list of people who should be trusted with this responsibility. Some hard questions are likely to come up, like “Can I help out with the Facebook promotion?” or “Why can’t I be on the social media team?” That means you’ll have to have some difficult conversations with these people. If this is the case, this might also be a good time to consider an internal social media certification program or limiting social media to certain departments or job descriptions.
Who Should Enforce It?
Enforcing a social media policy is going to be left up to two people: the person who is in charge of your social media efforts and your legal department or compliance representative, or both. In fact, this is where your legal and compliance departments are going to become important. After all, they understand what it’s going to take to keep your company out of trouble and its executives out of jail. So they’re the ones who will know better than anyone whether a tweet violates privilege or a blog post is going to reveal proprietary or sensitive information.
People might think it’s rather self-explanatory and easy to figure out. Remember the Washington Capitals’ hockey player who tweeted that he wasn’t going to dress for a playoff game that night? Although it may seem rather innocuous and a great way to keep fans involved in the team’s goings-on, it also accidentally revealed some valuable information to the other team.
Similar things can happen. An innocent tweet from the CEO of your company about a great meeting he had with the CEO of a competing company can possibly signal a merger, a sale of one company to the other, or—in a worst-case scenario—even be a red flag to the FTC that price fixing and collusion is taking place. This is why the social media person needs to work closely with the legal and compliance departments to make sure she understands what is acceptable communication and what is not.
This isn’t to say that the lawyers have to review everything that is going to be published through social media channels. They don’t review every email or listen in on every phone call, so they don’t need to review every tweet that goes out. There might be cases when even a two-hour delay is too long, and the effectiveness of a message will be lost. This is why the legal department needs to educate the social media department about what is acceptable communication. This is also where the social media people can educate the lawyers about the importance of customer communication and sounding human. So if any issues come up, especially if they have been spelled out in the policy, then it is up to either the social media head or the legal department to deal with any fallout, along with human resources.
In Ozzie Guillen’s case, the Major League Baseball head office and commissioner Bud Selig decided the suspension. In your company’s case, you need to appoint someone who will recommend and handle disciplinary measures if your social media policies are violated. However, because social media is still relatively new to you and your company, we don’t recommend firing someone for mistakes he makes, especially as your company is still learning to use this properly.
For example, social media agency New Media Strategies was fired by Chrysler after one of its coordinators sent a tweet that was intended for his personal account. After he was fired, and after Chrysler fired New Media Strategies, the social media world was abuzz, not with sympathy for the PR mess Chrysler was in, but for the young man who managed to tank his career in just 140 characters. Many perspectives in the online conversation that followed thought the two organizations overreacted.
Of course, there are scenarios where you would normally have to fire someone anyway, whether it happened on social media or not. Those situations are better decided internally and should be an overall part of your corporate policy, and not just limited to your social media policy.
Let’s Be Clear on the Responsibility
Because social media is a relatively new way for people to communicate and the lines between what is public and what is private are often blurred, social media often gets inaccurately blamed for violations of company policy or mistakes made by its users. In the case of New Media Strategies, some media reports and even blog posts about the incident called upon companies to review whether or not they should use Twitter or hire agencies to tweet for them. This line of thinking shows bias against the medium, not the user.
The coordinator mistakenly sent a personal tweet over a client Twitter channel. This is easily done if you’re not familiar with the Twitter application you’re using. But the blame for the incident is not appropriately aimed if it’s aimed at Twitter. The coordinator’s lack of care or understanding of the application he was using is to blame. Twitter had nothing to do with the mistake. It is merely the channel.
Similarly, in the summer of 2011, U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) posted a lewd photograph on Twitter that was intended to be a private message to a female follower. The mistake Weiner made was confusing the syntax of a direct (private) message on the platform with that of a public reply. The media coverage that encircled the Congressman after the incident included several sensational exposés and media indications that Twitter was too risky to use, that politicians shouldn’t be using the platform, and that this was another case of social media being bad for us.
What those media outlets did in their coverage was blame the tool, not the craftsman. The only person to blame for Anthony Weiner’s misstep was Anthony Weiner. He could have texted the message, emailed it, or printed it off and mailed it in an envelope. None of those channels would have been blamed. But because many media members, and the general public, didn’t yet have a comfort level with Twitter as a common communications channel, the chic thing to do was to blame the channel, not the culprit.
If your employees make a mistake on a social network, it does not mean your company should go run and hide from the social network. It means the company should do a better job of educating and empowering its employees to use the networks appropriately.
What If People Spend Too Much Time on Social Media?
There is a possibility that, appropriate use or not, your employees will spend more time on social media than is necessary. When this happens, their work suffers. This is where the social media director, the person’s supervisor, or both (see Chapter 14 for more information on models of social media management) will need to step in and have a discussion with the employee about getting his work done and not letting social media take over his job.
Of course, sometimes this becomes necessary, like if a customer service person takes on all social media complaints and can’t answer phone calls. Or a marketing person spends a lot of her time building an online community centered around a particular brand. In some cases, the person’s new duties will need to shift and change, as long as his efforts are producing a positive return for the company.
But there are times, as with any new tool or process, when it’s easy to let this become a distraction and a problem to be dealt with. In this case, deal with the distraction the same way you would with any other workplace distraction. Don’t let the fear of people spending all day on their Facebook accounts keep you from adopting social media. This is what your policy should address, as well as regular performance reviews and a good line of communication and regular updates between employees and managers. It’s perfectly acceptable (even encouraged) to include a statement in your policy that reads something like, “Although you have access to social networks from your workplace, you are still accountable for the job duties assigned to you and within the time frames they are assigned. Be mindful of your workload, expectations, and deadlines or the social media access may be removed.”
In reality, though, social media time spent is no different than many other workplace time-sucks. Being involved in too many committees or having too many meetings can be just as distracting, as can taking on too many projects. Social media is not to blame for this problem, but rather the employee’s work habits and time management. Work with the employee to better manage his or her time, rather than eliminate social media access.
Having a social media policy can ultimately save you and your company a lot of time and headaches if you establish who can and can’t use social media, what kinds of messages they can send out, and what consequences will happen if the policies are violated. Although it might seem rather harsh and violates the social media hippie viewpoint of “everyone needs to participate in the conversation,” they aren’t going to bail you out when your company gets into trouble because someone didn’t do what he was supposed to.
Trust everyone, but have a policy that deals with those who cannot or do not comply. Remember that even though social media offers a vast world for you and your employees to explore and even play in, social media for your company is about business.
Endnotes
1. Koka Sexton, “100 Examples of Corporate Social Media Policies,” May 14, 2011. http://www.kokasexton.com/word/100-examples-of-corporate-social-media-policies.
2. “Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/17313280/Template-Twitter-Strategy-for-Government-Departments.
3. Shift Communications, “Top 10 Guidelines for Social Media Participation at (Company),” http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/socialmediaguidelines.pdf.
4. Staci D. Kramer, “WaPo’s Social Media Guidelines Paint Staff into Virtual Corner,” September 27, 2009. http://paidcontent.org/article/419-wapos-social-media-guidelines-paint-staff-into-virtual-corner.
5. Staci D. Kramer, “WaPo’s Social Media Guidelines Paint Staff into Virtual Corner,” September 27, 2009. http://paidcontent.org/article/419-wapos-social-media-guidelines-paint-staff-into-virtual-corner.
6. Sam Hananel, “Woman Fired Over Facebook Comments Settles Suit,” February 8, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/woman-fired-over-facebook-comments_n_820487.html.