Friday Protip: Help With Crafting a Social Media Policy

By Sanya Weathers

(See Wednesday’s post for the questions you should ask yourself before you get started!) I’ve written a lot of these policies over the years, and I’ve made pretty much every mistake possible. Here are some of the things I learned the hard way:

– Keep it simple. You’re writing a policy for a worst case scenario, and the purpose is twofold – to protect employees, and to protect your brand. You are giving people guidelines for staying out of trouble. What’s the most likely cause of trouble? Posting while impaired. Whether the employee is impaired by alcohol, anger, or just bad judgment, you need to make sure your policy is simple and clear. If it’s longer than a page and has more paragraphs than bullet points, you did it wrong.

– Don’t overreach. You cannot tell people what to think in their free time. If you don’t want to associate your brand with a particular political ideology, or religious views, or whatever else, it is much easier to simply ask employees to not use their personal accounts to discuss work-related things.

Please note, this is an all or nothing policy point. You cannot say that Sam is welcome to retweet announcements and Beth is not.

Here’s the thing – most of your employees do not have a cult following. Most of your employees are not going to be evangelists for your brand. They’re going to retweet/like/share work stuff out of pride, but their focus will be their own personal stuff. Yes, every employee’s social media will reflect on you a little tiny bit, but only to the extent that a pebble chucked into the ocean creates a ripple. Take my advice: Unclench. It’s not worth panicking in advance. Just follow them with your company ID so you’ll have some warning if someone is hanging their rear end out in public. Ask them to fan/follow the official channels (to boost your numbers) and let it go.

– For the most public employees, use separate identities for Twitter, Facebook, etc.  See above for why personal accounts don’t make good professional channels. I recommend that your spokesman/most public facing employees have brand identified accounts utterly separate from their personal ones, because customers (especially in the online space) do have a hard time drawing a line between private and public personas.

– Train employees, don’t order employees. It’s a whole lot more pleasant for everyone if you offer a little training course in media management to employees with active social media accounts. Your policy should assume people want to do the right thing, and have good intentions. In order to prepare everyone for the glare of the spotlight, they need information. Topics to cover:
* The difference between crazy customers, frustrated customers, and passionate customers.
* Do not engage with crazy people. Refer crazy people to the community director.
* How to crank up your privacy settings on Facebook so fans and stalkers can’t look at your photos.
* There is no such thing as privacy on the internet.
* Sock puppets are VERY BAD.
* Customers cannot differentiate between lead designers and cubicle warriors.

So, what have I missed?