They say that loose lips sink ships. In the case of social media and your company, that saying might be a lot more literal than you want it to be! Social media can be a company’s best friend or worst nightmare.

When you want to make sure that it is working for you rather than against you, you need to consider how your social media policy needs to look. Essentially, a social media policy tells your employees what they can and cannot post regarding your company on their social media accounts.

A small amount of buzz from your employees is a great thing. The wrong irritable or indiscreet Tweet can cost you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of lost revenue! This is not a risk you should be prepared to take. Having a good social media policy in place can help prevent a lot of problems.

At the most basic level, your social media policy has two goals. It should prevent loss or damage to your business. It should encourage your employees to support your own social media efforts. Striking the right balance can be tough. This article can help you create a social media policy that pays off.

Understanding the Need for a Social Media Policy

Recent research by sociologists tells us that people love to network. They love to share information about what they know. When people work for a company, they become experts regarding that company. However, they are often confused about what they should share and what to keep to themselves.

When you give them a social media policy, you are not binding them. Instead, you set them free with guidelines to help them feel comfortable about what they say. They will not overshare something sensitive. They will not clam up about something potentially useful to you.

You are enlisting their aid on the social media that they and you use. You help them prevent an issue where they might feel exposed or need to be disciplined. Remember that the goal is to create a policy that is welcoming, not one that binds too tightly.

It may sound a little difficult, but it is definitely something that can be done. You just need to be aware of the nine parts of a good social media policy. Once you figure out what you need to know about these nine parts, you can create the policy that best serves your company.

1. Your Corporate Culture

Your corporate culture might be extremely traditional and practical. It might be slyly sarcastic. It might be amazingly exuberant, creative, extremely loving, or homey. Your corporate culture grows over time, developing into something that you could call your corporate personality.

As you write or rewrite your social media policy, keep your corporate culture in mind. Your policy should reflect that culture, not travel opposite or perpendicular to it. Get your HR and IT departments in on it as well. They are the departments that most likely deal with the policy. They can help you create the language that best suits your needs.

Remember that your goal here is to create an extension of your corporate culture. Make sure that other people understand how you operate and what you stand for. By creating a policy that keeps your corporate culture in mind, you follow through with that plan. Creating a document that matches your corporate culture is a great way to carry out the spirit of the company.

2. Get Everyone Involved

When writing a social media policy, you realize that it affects everyone in the company at every level. It’s not a joke that everyone is on Facebook now. Your company can have just as much trouble with a department head’s Tweet as you can with a call center representative’s blog entry.

To make sure that everyone is on board, hold a meeting that involves a few major stockholders and the delegates from the various departments in your company. At the very least, you need people from the legal department, communications, information department, and human resources there. Ideally, you will have one person from each department.

At the meeting, outline what you are doing. Make sure that you explain how the approval process for the policy will go. Remind everyone that having socially active employees is always going to be a benefit for the company. Instead of having a lot of radio silence over the matter, you will instead have people who appear passionate and devoted.

Remind them that this kind of engagement can never really be paid for. You must rely on the natural outpouring from your own employees. Socially empowered employees from companies like Dell and Cisco changed the way that people think about their companies. It is worth telling the representatives that as you hammer out the policy.

3. The Size of it All

When writing your social media policy, you need to be aware of how much you want to cover. At the very beginning, designing the scope of the plan influences its eventual shape. Finally, its effectiveness. You need to decide how all-encompassing the policy will be and what it affects.

First and foremost, think about how specific you want your policy to be. You may choose, for example, to write a different policy for each of the different departments and networks. Maybe your public relations team has a very specific set of instructions for what they can say on Twitter. Alternately, you may choose to create one general policy that can apply to the entire company as a whole.

While the second one is faster, it can leave you with some gaps that you need to cover up later. Remember that this policy is one that is for the general company. It will be followed by everyone from the head of HR to the techs in the field. Your social media team, the one that runs the company blog, needs its own policy with its own permissions and rules.

When creating a policy for your social media team, you need to be willing to create a stylebook and internal strategy. However, first and foremost, you need a general policy before you need anything else. This helps guide your efforts as you move further into the project.

4. Getting Legal Involved

How do state and federal laws affect your ability to control your social media? This is a question that needs to be answered by your legal department. Though surprisingly complicated, it still does need to get done. If you don’t do it, you can get fined. For example, be aware of the NLRB and any other federal labor laws that mention social media posts.

This is a serious situation that can make things much harder for you. Also, be aware that the Federal Trade Commission has rules on how you can present endorsements and reviews. You also find that some laws specifically prevent you from banning negative reviews from your online customer contracts. Remember that your policy affects everyone from the top of your company to the bottom.

If you ask for the wrong thing from your employees, you are going to be in some serious trouble. For example, in an attempt to better control their employee’s social media output, some companies ask for their employee’s personal user names and passwords. While this might sound like a great way to keep media from leaking, it is actually illegal to ask for this information in many states.

These states all have legislation that bans exactly that:

• California
• Delaware
• Michigan
• New Jersey
• Illinois
• Maryland
• Washington
• Utah
• Vermont
• Arkansas
• Colorado
• New Mexico
• Maine
• Oregon
• Nevada
• Wisconsin

When looking for the laws that pertain to this matter, the National Conference of State Legislatures offers some of the most detailed rulings available at this point. Further, The National Labor Relations Board helps employees act together to address conditions at their workplace.

Whether they have a union or not, these discussions include talks on social media. Your employees have rights. It is easy to infringe on them through ignorance. Do not let this happen to you!

5. Clear it Up

One of the main goals of your policy is to make sure that your employees know what they can talk about. Encourage them to be enthusiastic if they want to be. If you do this right, you will have people happy to share the good stuff that they know about your company while keeping the bad stuff to themselves. At this point, however, they might not know what to share or how they should do it.

Make sure that you address any issues that they have and that you are always willing to give them clear, solid answers. Before you publish your social media policy, ask around to see what questions need to be answered. While some specific questions need to be researched further, you will be surprised by how frequently some questions come up.

For example:

• Does the company look for personal posts?
• How should they interact with the company’s Facebook page?

Answer these questions in your social media policy FAQ.

6. Personal vs. Professional Use

There is a time and a place for everything. One thing that employees do not always understand is when they can be on their social media. For example, are they allowed to post materials when they are on break or at lunch? What about while on the clock but waiting for data to compile or copies?

One example of a policy that addresses this kind of behavior states that salary workers can access their social media during office hours whereas hourly workers are not. Of course, this is something that does not pertain to workers who deal directly with the social media of the company itself. These workers need good information and access to social media pages at all times.

Figure out whether you need your workers to talk about their relationship with the company when they post information about the company. Remind them that when they do that, they represent the company and should act accordingly. You may make suggestions regarding what they should post while on their own time.

You cannot mandate this. This would be extremely unethical and coercive. You can suggest it. This can be a tricky thing to tackle. For many companies, it is important. Having employees that send constant tweets into the world about how bored they are at work or waste their time on Facebook when at their computers is something damaging to your company. Correct it!

7. Break it Down

At this point, you should have pages of information regarding what should influence your company’s social media policy. In some cases, if you have a large company and a diverse range of employees with a relationship to public media, you may have enough paper to fill a binder or two. This is a good amount of information to have on file.

You should definitely organize it. Keep it on hand for your various affected departments. Legal, human resources, and public relations should all have access to this document, for example. However, when you want to make sure that your policy is actually followed, you cannot simply hand an entire binder of policy to each employee.

Instead, what you need to do is to take all of that information, condense it to about two pages, and distribute it. For example, Ford, a large company with workers all over the world, has a single-page policy. If someone needs the longer version, they can go find it. They do if they have doubts. On the other hand, most people are pleased to have a simpler policy to consult.

You may also choose to create a video to address your employees’ questions regarding the social media policy. Remember that multimedia is the best way to reach people and make it stick! Essentially, what you give people is a reference sheet.

On your policy page, you should touch on the main areas involved. At the bottom, let them know where they can find more information regarding the topic. Too many rules can make your employees feel frightened or upset. Just enough can empower them to take charge!

8. Training

After you have the documentation, you need to train people on the policy. This means frank discussion about what is and is not acceptable and a thorough talk about why it is necessary. Demonstrate how important a good face is to your company. Motivate your employees to get social in the right way.

9. Lift Off!

When you are ready to put your social media policy into action, have a party. People remember things better if given a healthy, happy stimulus to go with them. This is exactly what a party does. Reward people creating a name for themselves on their social media.

Create prizes for people who come up with interesting ways to talk about where they work. If you have some older employees who are not on social media yet, use this opportunity to teach them and get them excited. Remember that the more fun you make this, the better off you are going to be.

Conclusion

When you get right down to it, a great policy is one that pulls in views and gets you the attention that you need. We are not saying that it is easy. We are saying that it is necessary! Social media can be a difficult beast to tame.

When you do, you see that it has all been worth it. You need to listen to a number of different factors when creating your social media policy. You must be willing to be firm on some things while giving way to others. This is not a simple thing to do. Once you do it, you find that your employees reward you.

They want to talk about the company on their social media networks. You just need to give them an appropriate place and way to do so. Nurture your employees’ interest in getting your work out to the world. Remember that once you show them the way, the battle is won!

———————————————
Links Web Design is a Website Design Company in Bangor, Maine.