(By Efficient Hire Employee Onboarding Staff) With wildly popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the lines of personal and business use are becoming increasingly hazy. They ways people communicate with one another have changed tremendously in the past several years, and the power of these social networking sites is impossible to deny. How are your employees, customers, and vendors using these websites? How often are they using these sites and what are they saying about your company? As you explore these questions and more it's important to remember a few guidelines as you begin considering and developing a policy.
Sharlyn Lauby, President of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes employee training and human resources consulting, offers up 10 tips for your company's social media policy. In the article, "10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy", Lauby writes that while many organizations agree that a social media policy is needed, few know what they should be saying. Below are a few of those tips to help guide your policy, avoid any suprises and allow you to focus on engaging your customer.
Introduce the purpose of social media.
All policies need to address what’s in it for the reader/user — what should they take away after reading the policy? One of the common themes I kept coming across in introductions to social media policies is the idea that the policy should focus on the things that employees can rather than what they can’t do. For those of us who have experience writing policies, this is a real paradigm shift.But that’s the spirit of social media — it’s all about leveraging the positive. And that needs to be evident in the policy. Houghton agrees, “The old way of doing things is to create an unnecessarily restrictive model of engagement that prevents companies from leveraging new media appropriately.”
Be responsible for what you write
Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, explains that “people tend to interpret having the ‘right’ to express themselves online as implying a lack of consequences when they say stupid things.” That’s not the case. Your organization and its representatives need to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense.“Dooced” is an Internet expression that means to lose one’s job because of things one says on one’s website or blog. No one wants that to happen, of course, so using common sense and being responsible is important.
Consider your audience
When you’re out in the blogosphere or Twitterverse or other social media channels, remember that your readers include current clients, potential clients, as well as current/past/future employees. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info
Being transparent doesn’t mean giving out the Colonel’s special 11 herbs and spices used in KFC chicken or the recipe for McDonald’s Big Mac special sauce.Those examples seem pretty self-explanatory, but Meyer, points out that, “employers may fail to make employees aware of any obligation they may have to protect confidential or proprietary information.” Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Meyer says that every state has a law governing trade secrets. Therefore, employees who share confidential or proprietary information do so at the risk of losing their job and possibly even ending up a defendant in a civil lawsuit. At the very least, companies will seriously question the judgment of an employee who shares confidential or proprietary information via social media. It’s a good idea to make sure all of this is clearly laid out in your social media policy.
Productivity matters
Your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.
As you take these tips into consideration and use them to guide your own company's social media policy, it's important to remember there's no one-size-fits-all solution or template for creating a company policy. The policy should be something that reflects your company's culture and core values. However, having a policy in place is crucial as your employees, vendors and clients are using and will continue to use these sites.
Lauby's full article on social medial policies can be found on mashable.com as well as more tips and advice on introducing social media policy to your company.
