7 guidelines for social media guidelines
After all the recent hubbub over social media policies at the Washington Post and National Public Radio, one of my bosses forwarded me a link to a database of guidelines at SocialMediaGovernance.com. My own organization is in the midst of drafting guidelines. The editor has my draft; I await the results.
The resource at Social Media Governance includes links to policies from a range of organizations — media companies, governments, universities, PR firms, non-profits, public companies and more. Some focus on how the organizations use social media for their own ends. Others seek to govern how employees use social media on their own time.
I read a bunch of them. Some were very long. Others concise. Drawing on the common themes I saw, here my seven guidelines for drafting social media guidelines. Read more
7 sites to train freelance bloggers about journalism
Courtesy kogakure, via Flickr under CC 2.0 license. http://bit.ly/tzAfY
One of my small pleasures at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a blog our religion writer Tim Townsend and I created. It’s called “Civil Religion.” For a year and a half, it’s been The Little Blog That Could. Nearly every post attracts comments. It gets respectable traffic numbers (more when it’s featured on the home page of STLtoday.com, of course). And its following is a loyal one.
The blog started with a dozen writers from the St. Louis community, representing a variety of faith traditions from Judaism to Islam to Christianity in many stripes — Catholicism, Mormon, evangelical and Episcopalian.
About a week ago, we debuted an expanded stable of bloggers. Some had dropped out of the earlier group. Now we’re up to about 30 who contribute and, already, we’ve seen traffic increase from the more-frequent contributions to the blog. I’m grateful for their contributions and their passion for the subject. They engage readers, they are often insightful and frequently controversial.
Now, a new development: Public relations people have begun taking notice of the blog, and send releases to our contributors, all of whom have day jobs, some of whom are clergy men and women. They have asked Tim what they can do with the releases. Some are interested in pursuing interviews, doing some research on the books, people, products and events that are presented to them.
They want to be reporters. Read more
Journalists’ lessons — from companies like Dell?
Richard Binhammer (Credit: www.briansolis.com via Flickr)
I came across the social media engagement report in July from Wetpaint and Altimeter focusing on how companies measure the bottom-line effectiveness of their social media efforts. The report focused on four companies — Dell, Starbucks, SAP and Toyota. The online database/website focuses on a great many more. To me, it’s not surprising that the study found…
…that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful. So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.
The report ranked the level of social engagement by various brands. Dell was second. That, of course, is noteworthy four years after the “Dell Hell” period, in which the company seemed to turn a deaf ear to the rage in the blogosphere over various customer service issues. Chief among the negative bloggers was Jeff Jarvis, who shared intimately his own customer service issues with Dell, and later declared an end to Dell Hell in Business Week after having an opportunity to interview Michael Dell himself and spend time at the company.
Not long after the Engagement report came out, I was offered the chance to speak to Richard Binhammer, Dell’s senior manager of corporate affairs. This was shortly after the uproar over the Washington Post’s social media guidelines for its newsroom. So it was amusing to see how open and engaged a massive company like Dell was willing to allow its employees to be. Read more
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