You’re not still using a social media policy that you found on the internet and ran a find-and-replace using your company name, are you?
From our work over the past two years, I can tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media policy. Based on our client advisory work, Ellen Reynolds and Kate Rush Sheehy are proposing a panel for South by Southwest 2011, called How Social Policies Affect Company Culture. If selected, Ellen and Kate will share their experiences with you that they’ve gained across multiple client engagements while assisting with policy creation and launch.
They will cover:
- The importance of having a defined social media policy.
- The non-negotiable points that all social media policies must cover.
- How to successfully create, approve and enforce your social media policy.
- The importance of accurately reflecting your unique company culture in your policy, and how to use your policy to encourage the right level of internal and external participation.
They’ll answer these questions from a client-side perspective:
- What information must my social media policy cover?
- Who should be involved in the creation and approval process?
- How can I make sure my social policy is a good fit for my company/company culture?
- How do I make sure that my policy is encouraging participation rather than hindering it?
- How often do I need to revisit my policy?
If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to How Social Policies Affect Company Culture.
This should be a great session. However; I do hope that the attendees (and the presenters) also resonate the need for specific policy for your company and your particular team that is appropriately tied into the right regulation and risk management considerations. We deal with companies all day long that have solid policies created by corporate counsel that miss the nuances involved in compliance, and also the realities in social media. The fact is that it should be a team effort between a true social media expert (not the college intern you hired to post messages to Facebook,) HR (who will hopefully do more than pass around a piece of paper as part of a new employee packet – but instead hire experts to deliver REAL training on policy and how not to be dumb and put the company at risk,) IT to help with security issues, and marketing/corp communications to ensure proper messaging. Most of the case law we see involves someone at a company not breaking a solid policy at all, but instead, not being smart communicators.
Amanda Vega
http://www.amandavega.com