Social Media Policy – Whats and Whens Behind Your Guidelines

Does your organization have a defined social media policy? The mechanics behind creating a social media policy are an area where we’ve collaborated with Nate Riggs, President and Lead Strategist of Social Business Strategies, to develop strategic thinking exercises to identify key social media-related issues. These are essentially the do’s and don’ts to be considered in defining a social media policy.

We’re always refining our strategic thinking exercises to make them more situation than category-based. As a result, they’re moving toward the form of, “What should happen when something else happens?”

Based on our experiences, some of the situations your social media policy ought to consider include:

• What should take place when a customer complains?
• What do you want to happen when someone takes exception to your point of view?
• What are the differences when one of your social media team members is using social media professionally vs. personally? What about when it’s an employee not on the social media team?
• When is it okay to share and not share content about work that you do for customers?
• Are there times when norms on social media transparency contrast with your organization’s culture?

That’s a sampling of the situations we’re addressing with clients to create social media guidelines.

For us, the watchword for developing a social media policy is simplicity. In that vein, I wrote a guest post for Nate Rigg’s blog on the world’s simplest social media policy. If you don’t have some type of social media guidelines in place right now, this will be a helpful starting point, especially related to social media content sharing.

What situations would you add to shape the most effective social media guidelines?

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming^TM blog, and serves as the company’s chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” and is a frequent keynote presenter.