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I recently introduced Social Media to my employer (the company provides two-way radios and wireless communications solutions to military, police, and fire depts). At the moment Social Media consists of Twitter and YouTube pages and I own those accounts. I've been tasked with developing a Social Media Policy for the company to include who can post content, guidelines, etc.
Can anyone provide examples of a Social Media Policy?
Google Social Media policy and you'll find plenty of examples. I'm developing ours right now and I can tell you most are based upon IBM's. It's available on the web. At a recent Ragan Conference there were other examples shared but I've found most are so close to what IBM did that you may as well start there.
It's always important to make your social media policy as inclusive as possible. You want different points of view - it's not about being a gatekeeper (although you have a policy to create some guidelines), but rather about 'encouraging' different points of view (within limits).
Joe Troxler
Communications and Media Consultant
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Intel's social media guidelines are frequently cited as a good model. You should be able to find them with a simple search.
One of my favorite policies is from an Australian company, Telstra. They use a "3 Rs" approach to teach employees how to use social media responsibly. You can read about it at http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/media/announcements_article.cfm?ObjectID=45425.
For some great articles on this topic, browse through Mashable's archive at http://mashable.com.
I have been doing a lot of research into social media policy as well as social media disclosure.
The idea of a policy assumes control, I would greatly recommend looking at it from a guidelines perspective (as we all know, rules are often meant to be broken.)
One of the most important thing to do is involve the company and employees in the process. If you are going to create a plan of forward thinking action, you need to create a goodwill scenario that individuals within the company feel like contributors and not slaves.
In working with policy roll-outs, it is also a key time to embrace beneficial reasons why certain ideas are in place at the company level. Do some research and help individuals within your organization create better, more robust presence as individuals and as professionals representing your company.
You can visit my blog at do a search for social media policy to see collection of 100 or so policies (it is also on the top few results on Google for that key phrase.)
Have you checked out the Social Media Policy Database? Our Sutter Health policies are linked here (under health care) but you can find policies from a number of industries as well.
