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Social Media Policy Guidelines Can Encourage Use Outside Enterprise and Adoption Within

by Bill Ives

July 12, 2009 at 2:08 am · Filed under FASTforward'09

As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups. I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call. Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.

However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary. I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines. Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.

“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice, and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”

You can find the details at the IBM site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun’s policy begins with this statement, “Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.

Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training.

These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on a number of occasions. The RightNow guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.

Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise.

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Jeffrey LevyJuly 13th, 2009 at 9:24 am

Good points all. The trick is balancing trust and responsibility. But it’s important to err on the side of trust; regulating according to the worst actors might give a false sense of message safety, but will also mean many missed opportunities.

The gov’t Social Media Subcouncil maintains a wiki where we invite anyone, inside gov’t or not, to help us shape our use of these tools. You might be particularly interested in the growing list of social media policies: http://govsocmed.pbworks.com/Web-2-0-Governance-Policies-and-Best-Practices

I hadn’t seen the RightNow policy, so I added it to our list.

Please join us and help us serve you better!

Jeffrey Levy, co-chair
Social Media Subcouncil
US EPA Director of Web Communications

Amit DesaiAugust 4th, 2009 at 6:27 am

Nice article and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I firmly believe that every organization big or small should have a social media policy. Recently I completed an analysis on usage of social media and its impact on productivity and have published my findings here http://www.gigathoughts.com/social-media/do-you-have-a-social-media-policy-for-your-organization.html

Hope you guys find it useful and also do let me know your views on the same

Chris BoudreauxAugust 20th, 2009 at 12:28 am

For anyone developing or researching social media policies, this database contains links to more than 60 policies, and you can filter by industry:

http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php