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.
Be encouraging
I was amazed how few guidelines overtly encouraged employees to use social media. Then I saw this from Chicago’s DePaul University: “DePaul University supports your participation in these online communities.” If you really do think social media is important for your organization, say so.
Be positive
The best of the guidelines I read framed their advice positively – do this, rather than don’t do this. Some of the guidelines I read credited Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, for inspiration. Almost every point of its social media guideline is expressed in the form of “respect” for various principles: for the church and staff; for the beliefs of the church; for copyright laws; for your time at work; and so forth.
Be brief
Less is more. The longer your guidelines are, the more your employees will be discouraged from participating. If employees fear running afoul of an edict buried in a morass of examples, what-ifs and scenarios, you’ll teach them that nothing can be gained by dipping their toe into social media. You can’t anticipate everything. Don’t try. I thought the American Red Cross did a pretty good job of respecting this suggestion. So did a template suggested by Shift Communications in Boston. The BBC didn’t.
Be respectful
Your guidelines should send a message to your employees: You trust them. You already trust them to speak to customers, readers, sources and advertisers on the phone, by e-mail, on the street. Trust them elsewhere.
Be reflective
Reflect back on existing policies. Why repeat what’s already spelled out in your existing ethics guidelines? You’ve already told employees that they shouldn’t reveal proprietary information, trade secrets and private data. For journalists, you’ve already got guidelines that caution against overtly supporting campaigns, candidates or issues that could open them to charges of bias. A quick reminder of how that plays out in the language of social media — friends, followers and causes — would suffice. This, BBC did well. So did Dell, the Mayo Clinic, Yahoo! and National Public Radio (which I also reviewed, though it is not included in the database just yet).
Be social
Many of the guidelines I reviewed encouraged employees to participate in dialog, with three reminders: Remember how your online behavior reflects on you and the company; respect colleagues’ privacy; assume nothing posted online will remain private.
Be available
Many of the guidelines recognized that they couldn’t anticipate every situation. They encouraged employees to ask a supervisor if they had questions.
Here’s a few specific highlights I ran across.
Value what employees can do. The American Red Cross asks employees to let headquarters know if they’re blogging. “National headquarters does not intend to ‘police’ the blogging community. Quite the contrary: we want to aggregate all the powerful stories Red Crossers are telling and showcase your individual contribution to the overall mission and gather links in a page at Redcross.org.”
Over-thinking, over-regulating, over-doing it. The BBC’s guidelines include this: “Through the open nature of such sites, it is also possible for third parties to collate vast amounts of information. For example, The Shawshank Redemption is the most popular film amongst the 11,899 members of the BBC network on Facebook and 8 percent list their political views as ‘liberal’.” My heavens. Is this kind of detail really necessary? This sounds paranoid, not encouraging.
Disclosure is good. Almost every policy requires employees to make their affiliation clear. Some only require it if employees will be mentioning their association with the company in their online activities. I found this line curious in the Mayo Clinic’s guidelines: “If your blog, posting or other online activities are inconsistent with, or would negatively impact Mayo Clinic’s reputation or brand, you should not refer to Mayo Clinic, or identify your connection to Mayo Clinic.”
Friends aren’t necessarily friends. Guidelines that dictate who I can have on my “friends list” rub me wrong. That seems to invest the concept of “friends” with more meaning than it should. It doesn’t account for the fact that anyone, at any time, could become a “source.” Or that a friend who works in the neighboring cubicle today could work for the PR firm across town tomorrow.
The Roanoke Times‘ guidelines say, “Manage your friends carefully. Having one source on your friends list but not another is easily construed as bias. As above, be consistent. Accept no sources or people you cover as friends, or welcome them all.” Sure, ask employees to “manage friends carefully.” And leave it at that.
Don’t make it sound scary. This line in NPR’s guideline strikes me as raising fear: “Use the highest level of privacy tools available to control access to your personal activity when appropriate, but don’t let that make you complacent. It’s just not that hard for someone to hack those tools and make public what you thought was private.”
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