A lot of companies are wrestling with social media’s role in their company. Like anything, there are a lot of voices being expressed about social media:
- It’s a waste of time. No one has time to for it.
- It’s a freedom of personal expression. Insofar as it doesn’t compromise work performance, no one should care.
- Smartly participate in social media since everyone is a custodian of the company’s brand.
- Employees can (too) easily say/write something that hurts the organization. The answer is to control who can/cannot represent the company.
My company is just now starting the internal discussion. We recently had our first cross-functional meeting with individuals from our legal, product, marketing and services teams attending. It is a start of a discussion and learning how we use social media and underscoring the need for guidance. Our social media policy is a bit dated (with the title of “Electronic Forum Policy” sounding very 2004). If you’re in a similar boat, here are some resources I’ve found:
- IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. Fortunately, it doesn’t list a bunch of “don’ts”. Rather it encourages the best of social media attributes: transparency, authenticity, adding value.
- The Blog Council’s Disclosure Best Practice Kit. This is an organization of senior executives in major brands involved in blogging and/or social media.
- Wall Street Journal gives an example of how not to develop a social media guideline. I’ve included the editorial because I agree with it.
- Sharlyn Lauby has some pointers on building a policy and Jeremiah Owyang solicits samples of corporate policies (be sure to read the comments links to samples).
Of course, if you have samples of social media policies that you wouldn’t mind sharing (attribute-able or not), please let me know. It will help further the conversation and off set the plethora of legal webinars that seem to be designed just to scare the crap out of us.
Picture by fabbio
A quick update (5/28/09)… Two social media folks to follow are Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li. They cover the social media industry extensively and Charlene has a wiki listing current publicly listed social media policies of major companies and organizations here. Good folks, useful stuff.
