Jenny Schmitt bio:
Jenny-Rebecca Schmitt is a veteran public relations and marketing professional, trainer and sought-after public speaker. Her 15-year marketing and communications career includes experience in the fields of sports marketing, nonprofit marketing, healthcare communications, and public relations.
As someone working everyday in the social media space, I get asked a lot, a lot, about social media policies. While you can refer to a near encyclopedia of examples and build a behemoth with legal, HR and a “committee” – more than likely you’ll end up with a document that few people will read and even fewer will follow. With more employees using smart phones and easier ways to circumvent blocks at work, you’re assured that folks are going to engage in social media. (Something I strongly encourage, after all, it’s about listening, collaboration – who doesn’t want that in their company culture?)
Instead of a laborious policy that no one reads and sits in a perfectly bland 3-ring binder in a cabinet somewhere, look to keep it as simple as possible. My take? Seven rules (tenets, principles, points, whatever you call them) to compose nearly any effective social media policy:
Social media policies are only useful if people can read them - in less than 10 minutes.
Be smart: You are bound by your company’s policies and by common sense, even on social media channels. Everything you say online is in the public space and is permanent, act accordingly.
Be responsible: You are responsible to any content, conversation or comment you post.
Be truthful: All information posted should be factual and accurate, and also atrributed properly if you’re quoting someone else or his/her research. Contribute to content or conversations that are within your area of expertise. If you come across any area of concern on a social media channel, direct the link to the appropriate expert or product manager. If it’s a legal issue or question, simply pass that link with a request for review and comment to your company’s Legal Department (or if you’re in a smaller company, send it to HR or the boss). In the same notion, if you make a mistake, admit it and correct it quickly.
Be transparent: Fully disclose your status an employee/contractor with your company.
Be sensitive: Do not post or reference confidential information related to the company or any of its products. (You’d think this would be obvious, but plenty of folks post inside intell into the company’s prospects, products, or personnel. See first point above.)
Be polite: Online communities are not the place to disparage competitors, coworkers, vendors or anyone related to the work and products of your company. Social media is not the place to get into any online exchange that could be construed as negative or bickering. If you can post a factual correction to misstated facts related to products or services, do so simply, factually and politely.
Be secure: Read and understand the security policies, terms of agreement of every social media channel in which you engage. Only allow “pop-ups” if you know and trust the source. Check with IT before opening or running any “.exe” file.
What do you think? What might you add, takeaway, or fill-in?
And yes, feel free to “borrow” this to start your own social media policy. And if you want your people to be socially-sensible and successful, send over a note.
We’re big fans of TED and thankful they share the videos from their incredible roster of speakers. This talk from Nicholas Christakis discusses the influence of our vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. He tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know. After watching the video, we were left with two questions: what’s the influence of our own network? are we even aware of its influence on us?
What do you think? What’s the influence of your network?
Just about everyone that is even remotely Web-savvy these days throws around the term “Web 2.0″ (or “social media”) to evoke the evolutionary Web technologies that are enabling rich, interactive and collaborative Web experiences. These experiences are changing the way we interact with people and information. But what is not well understood is how these experiences and enabling technologies should change and elevate your expectations of consultants that you hire to help grow your business. If you are in the market for consulting services in the areas of marketing, communications, sales, business development or recruiting, you should expect a deeply engrained understanding and daily use of the very Web 2.0 ideas that may have left your business behind.
Here are three things you should look for when evaluating your prospective business partner’s understanding of the brave new Web:
1. To be an expert, they have to use it extensively. You wouldn’t hire a landscaper if you drove by their house and saw a weedy front lawn and untrimmed hedges. And you wouldn’t hire a personal trainer that is overweight. If someone says they believe in the transformative potential of Web 2.0, then you need to see proof that they understand it deeply and that they leverage it for the benefit of their own benefit. Do they have a Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace presence? Do they use Twitter or conventional blogs to communicate and collaborate? Or do they have a boring, static Web page that’s difficult to find in search engines? If they don’t understand Web 2.0 enough to raise the awareness of their business, then they can’t do it for yours.
2. If they believe in it, they should stick with it. Your candidate consultants have doubtlessly faced questions about Web 2.0, social networking, etc. so they have likely looked into it and started using it, getting past the first criterion. However, did they just sign up for all of these things to check off items on their Web presence to-do list? Did they create accounts everywhere to get started, then fell quiet? Is their information on all of the various social media and social networking sites stale and abandoned? If they signed up for Twitter and use it once every three weeks, they don’t understand it. If they created a blog, but the last post is from 2006, they don’t believe in it. If they have a corporate MySpace presence but no friends, they don’t see the value in it. If they don’t believe in this stuff for their own benefit, then they will not do you any good with it.
3. How careful are they with their social media identity? For those that do have a modern Web presence, you should peer into their online identity to catch a glimpse of what they think about themselves and their customers. What are they writing about? Who do they associate with? Are there other people talking about them? Are they careful about potentially sensitive information? If they’re not smart caretakers of their own online identity, then they definitely won’t be responsible with yours.
