Social Media Policies Presentation Christy Season

Social Media Guidelineswhy have it • what it looks like • who should it cover

Christy A. Season, CAPMSMC Columbia | 07.30.09

Christy A. Season, CAPM 2

You can’t ignore social media anymore

• Verdict is in: social media is here to stay– Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of

more than 7 million visitors in the US for the month– 65.7 million unique visitors (and growing) on Facebook– Source: Nielsen Online

• Social Media is no longer Gen Y dominated– Facebook’s largest group of users are 35 -54– Number of Facebook users aged 55 and over has

grown from 950,000 to 5.9 million in only 6 mo. – Source: iStrategy Labs

• Your employees are using it – at work, at home, on their cell phones . . .

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Why put guidelines in place?

• More than 1 in 5 companies have disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies in the last year– Of these companies, half have terminated an employee for such a

violation. (Source: ProofPoint – security company)

• Over 20% have investigated the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via a blog or message board posting. (Source: ProofPoint – security company)

• One-third of employees surveyed never consider what their boss or customers might think before posting material online (Source: Deloitte Ethics & Workplace Survey)

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• Unauthorized or inappropriate commentary or posts online can:– Get the company, and the employee, in legal trouble with the U.S. and

other government agencies, other companies, customers or the general public.

– Diminish the company’s brand name by creating negative publicity for the company, owners and partners as well as employees.

– Cause damage to the company by releasing non-public information or proprietary information.

– Cost the company the ability to get patents or undermine your competitive advantage.

– Cost the employee their job at the company.

Source: Click to Client – Online Marketing Experts

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Why put guidelines in place?• There’s the stupid . . .

– Arlington, Ore. Mayor posts racy pictures of herself in lingerie posing on a city fire truck on her MySpace profile

– Charlotte school teacher gets fired from teaching job for posting derogatory statements on her Facebook profile about her students

– Dominoes employees create viral video showing them doing disgusting things to a customer’s food order

• There’s those who just didn’t know better . . .– New employee hired at company blogs about first day at work, shares

proprietary information– Employee posts status update to Facebook about how hard the Excel sheet

he’s working on is – and includes a screen shot of the Excel file, complete with confidential financial data

– Employees sharing confidential, internal e-mails or communications by posting them online in comments to news stories or blogs – they are just trying to help

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Knee jerk reaction• “Let’s just block all social media sites”

– Would you take away e-mail from employees? Or their phones?– Still have access outside of work

• Employees don’t need social media to goof off at work– Performance issue, not a technology issue– Before social media…before computers…

• Workers would gather around the water cooler for some mindless banter• Cigarette breaks, head to the vending machines, co-worker's office for chit-chat

– Social media at work improves productivity?• University of Melbourne research found that people who took small breaks between tasks were

9% more productive than their colleagues who did not

• You want your employees to be innovative, creative, and make good quality decisions using competitive information– So why would you prevent access to these new tools?– Twitter reports news faster than most news agencies– Social media is free and information is instant

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Knee jerk reaction• Gen-Y and newer generations expect to have access

– While not a Gen-Y exclusive tool anymore, it’s still an expectation of Gen-Y– Children are interacting with computers and social media at a younger and younger age– New generations are entering the workplace and expect to leverage tools like text

messaging, Twitter, blogs, and Facebook

• A recent survey has 39% of younger workers considering leaving their jobs if they lost access to the popular social networking site (Source: Telindus)– Blocking access sends a bigger message to younger generations who value work-life

balance– “We don’t trust you.”– “Your duties here are more important than the rest of your life”.

• 21% would just be annoyed– Younger employees might not quit, but in a competitive job

market, it might be enough to make them choose another employer over you

– Happy employee = engaged employee = higher profits

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• Social media is simply a new channelto an existing assortment of channels already accessible to your employees– E-mail– Telephone– Face-2-face– Etc.

• We already have policies and guidelines in place for these channels, social media is just a new addition– Extend existing policies to social media

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Why put guidelines in place?• Your employees are your brand, their behavior online reflects

on the company• Employees generally want to do the right thing, violations

occur due to lack of education– Most applicable to new employees

• Policies or guidelines can easily be created to guide employees on the rights and wrongs of using social media– Guide employees - don’t mandate if possible, tell them how to use it,

or discourage use– Employees will begin to govern themselves

• Determine up front whether to create a policy or guidelines – Important to distinguish between the two

• Guidelines are best practices, ”nice-to-have”• Policy violations can have serious consequences for your business

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Basic Process for Creating Social Media Guidelines

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Step 1: Create cross-functional committee

Step 2: Benchmark- Other companies-Your existing policies

Step 3: Identify Sections/Areas to cover

Step 4: Develop the content for each section

Step 5: Reviews and edits with the committee

Step 6: Present to Policy Dept/Policy Committee

and get buy-in

Step 7: Present to senior level management and

get buy-in

Step 8: Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Get employee feedback.

Step 9: Reevaluate and keep it current


Step 1: Create a committee

• Create a cross-functional committee consisting of representatives of departments who have a vested interest in policies– Our Committee

• Corporate Communications• IT• Corporate Compliance• HR

• Include all generations• Ensures you get input from all aspects, cover all

bases

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Step 2: Don’t reinvent the wheel

• Look at available policies/guidelines from other companies– See what works already– Reach out to others in your industry

• You already have policies in place for e-mail, computer use at work, and public discourse– Use these existing policies and extend to cover

social media

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Step 3: Choose your high level sections

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• Decide what needs to be covered in the guidelines

• Choose sections that make sense with your business and for your employees

• We used a worksheet comparing main sections from policies/guidelines we benchmarked (see handout)– Helped us see what was used across all

policies and allowed us to ‘pick and choose’ what worked for us

– Shows typical sections found in social media policies


Step 4: Develop out the content

• Important to use same tone as your other company policies– Tone of guidelines must match other

existing policies– Tone and content of document must

reflect culture of the company• Otherwise employees won’t take it seriously and it won’t be

effective

• Be sure to define within guidelines what ‘social media’ is and what it covers

• Cover what happens when certain aspects of the guidelines are violated

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Step 5: Review and edit

• Walk through the guidelines word for word, as a group with the committee• Make edits, tweaks, changes as needed

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Step 6: Present to Policy Committee

• Your guidelines won’t be taken seriously unless you have buy-in from the top• Make sure your top level management understand the need for the

guidelines, the benefits of the guidelines, and the guidelines itself!• Guidelines will help you sell social media to senior management

Step 7: Present to sr. level management

• Present guidelines to policy group if it exists in your organization• Get their support and make sure they are on board before next step


Step 8: Communicate the guidelines• If employees don’t know it exists, how will they follow it?• Communicate across all internal channels the new guidelines

– Explain the why and what the expectations are– Include it in your new employee orientation

• Get feedback– Some organizations let employees help shape

the guidelines– Post it to your intranet and let employees edit

the guidelines and tell you what you’ve got right and what doesn’t make sense

• Create additional communications to help explain guidelines or to provide counsel (see Air Force hand out)

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Step 9: Reevaluate and keep it current• Social media is constantly growing and changing with new

sites and tools launching every day– Don’t let your policy get outdated

• Keep the policy up-to-date and current by continuously updating thepolicy to match the current social media environment

• Continue to solicit employee feedback• We are looking into the possibility

down the road to merge existing policies with social media guidelines– Considering creating an umbrella ‘electronic media’ policy that covers

all channels

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Who should it cover?

• EVERYONE!– All of your employees have access to social media

• Policy should cover all employees• Doesn’t make sense to limit it to specific groups

– Contractors may or may not be covered• If you generally include contractors in existing corporate policies, it makes

sense to include them in the guidelines• If you are unsure, check with the company that employs the contractors

to see what guidelines are already in place

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Trust your employees. . .• Policy or no policy, there will always be the individuals who goof off on social

media at work or share too much information.– With or without social media, chances are these folks would be in trouble with

management regardless• The majority of your employee population will govern themselves, act responsibly,

and may even help promote your brand.– Employees are your greatest ambassadors– They can help shape and control the message just as much as any PR firm

• Zappos.com– Blown away competition with marketing and new sales opportunities by allowing its

employees to interact with customers and businesses via social media (Twitter)

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Sean R. Nicholson, author of the Intranet Experience blog, says it best, “Sometimes a simple reminder of good judgment can have as powerful of an effect as a harsh corporate policy…What’s the alternative? Write a complex policy banning them from social media activities that is both unrealistic and unproductive. And what fun is that??”

Thank You.Questions or Comments?

Christy A. Season, [email protected]@ChristySeason

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Social Media Policies Presentation Christy Season