In my last post we explored the policies that companies should consider internally, within their organization, when getting started in social media.

This time we’ll take a look at the social media policies that organizations might consider posting publicly, for everyone to see. There are two:

1. Comment moderation policy
2. Interaction policy

Comment moderation policy

Comment moderation policies are closely related to one of the “norms” of social media, and one of the aspects which organizations that can find hardest to stomach: People expect that when they leave a comment, it will appear on the site.

If someone posts a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site, they may react badly. These reactions can range from repeated attempts to post comments, letters to your boss, to independent posts on other sites that are out of your control, through to sparking the organization of activist activities on an ongoing basis.

Frankly though, if you have an official blog you may want to review comments before posting them. You’re probably quite sensitive about the site content anyway, and you know that the Google has a very long memory.

So how do you protect your organization from a consumer backlash, while protecting the conversation on your site from being derailed?

You publish a comment moderation policy, to which you can point if you have to reject someone’s comment. It’s out there, up-front, and nothing is hidden so people should have no complaints if they violate it. Think of it as an insurance policy, just in case something goes wrong.

Consider covering the following:

• Language and manners: Will you reject comments which include offensive or inappropriate language?
• Personal attacks: Will you rule out personal attacks? Ideally you might allow people to question or argue the content – after all, this medium is about conversation. Aggressive attacks, though, are another thing.
• On-topic comments: What will you do with comments that veer away from the topic of the post or other peoples’ comments?
• Comment spam: Will you allow comments that appear to be spam?
• Number of links: Do you want to limit the number of links that you will allow? Will you use no-follow links?
• Blocking: Will you take action against repeat offenders?
• Contact: Will you provide a way for commenters to contact someone if their comment is not approved, or if they have other questions?

Online interaction policy

Let’s say you recognize the importance of listening and, as your online efforts mature, you’re starting to engage with the people talking online about your industry. The trouble is, you know that once you start to engage with people online they’ll expect it and you know that you’re not going to want to respond to everyone. You should try to avoid the “dark side” of social media.

How do you draw the line? 

As with your comment moderation, you state up-front which conversations you will engage in, and which you won’t. Again, having this posted publicly on your site gives you the ability to point to it if someone asks why you haven’t responded to their posting.

An interaction policy also helps by adding some credibility to your approach, as you can publicly set clear standards for your interactions. This has the additional benefit of reinforcing your standards with your employees.

You may want to consider the following facets of an engagement policy:

Conversations:

• Spam and off-topic comments: Will you respond to spam or off-topic comments? Likely not.
• Defamation: You may want to avoid responding to defamatory remarks.
• Misinformation: Ideally, you should aim to correct misinformation as soon as possible. Remember, if people don’t see a correction they may assume an incorrect statement to be true.
• Dissent: What’s your approach to commenters who simply disagree with you? Will you debate with them? Will you avoid the conversation? Where do you draw the line between dissent and trolling?

Standards:

• Timeliness: Assuming your processes allow for it (which they ideally should), consider stating that you will reply to online comments as soon as possible.
• Honesty and accuracy: Consider stating that you will take all possible steps to ensure that what you post is complete and accurate.
• Error correction: Make it clear that if you post something that you discover is inaccurate, you will endeavour to correct it immediately.
• Confidentiality: Publicly state that you will not discuss confidential information.
• Disclosure: Note that when employees engage  in public conversations about the organization, they will disclose their affiliation.

Your interaction policy will also benefit from an internal component – a clearly-defined process for how to go about those interactions. The US Air Force has a well thought-out decision tree that lays out the considerations for whether to respond to posts. You may want to tweak it for your organization, but it provides an excellent starting point.

Beyond this, though, clearly lay-out who is responsible for what in your process, and the timelines involved. As Alex de Bold said to me last week, social media moves in dog years. You won’t have time to figure this out on the fly. Will you triage posts? What approvals are needed at each level?

Thinking this through in advance will not only make your life easier, it may also save you if things do go wrong at some point and people ask why things were handled a certain way.

Conclusion

This is the final part of a three-part series on social media policies. To get the full story, check out the rest of the social media policy series. Once again, a big hat tip goes to Michael O’Connor Clarke for his ideas on this topic over the last few months.

Do you have these kinds of policies? What would you change in the approaches above?

Your organization is dipping its toe into the social media pool, but you know you need the right policies in place to set the stage. Where to start?

In this post I’ll outline, at a top level, three internal policies that you should consider when your organization is getting started in social media:

• Blogging policy
• Outbound commenting policy
• Employee guidelines

Step one: review your organization’s existing policies. Your existing employee standards may cover much of what you’re about to read here. If you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, don’t. In that case, consider finding a way to draw attention to those policies – basic training or an aggregation of those policies on your intranet, for example.

I’m not a legal expert, but here are some pointers on the internal social media policies you should consider for your company. Some of these specifically overlap, on the assumption that you may not implement all of them. Edit, tweak, add to your heart’s delight. These are just starting points.

Blogging Policy

With hundreds of millions of blogs out there, chances are that some of your employees have their own blogs outside work. You may have your own official blogs at work, too. 

Your blogging policy lets your employees know where the line is when writing on their own blogs, whether official or otherwise.

Consider covering:

• Advice - tips on things like transparency, disclosure, human voice, etc – not necessarily rules; rather they’re guidelines for how to approach the medium with a minimum of risk and maximum effect
• Attribution – state that if employees cite content created by others, they should acknowledge it
• Copyright – may employees use the organization’s logo, name etc (you may want to restrict their use)? Also consider stating that employees should not violate the copyright of others
• Ownership – who owns the content of employee blogs, along with the responsibility for the content?
• Confidentiality - as with the employee guidelines below, consider stating explicitly that employees should not disclose confidential information. It’s common sense, but you should be explicit.
• Disclaimer – should employees state that they are writing as themselves, not as representatives of the company (unless they are)?
• Existing policies – note that the blogging police does not supercede other existing policies, and that employees must continue to abide by those.

Outbound commenting policy

Your outbound commenting policy sits between the “blogging policy,” which covers employee social media properties, and the general “employee social media guidelines,” which cover more generic use of tools. The grey area: when representatives and other employees comment on other peoples’ sites.

This policy can be a bit simpler than the other policies here. Consider covering:

• Do no harm – may employees attack competitors via their comments (which may reflect badly on your company)?
• Transparency – if commenting on a work-related discussion, should employees disclose their affiliation/conflict of interest?

Also consider the internal process for monitoring and responding to conversations. Which conversations will you engage in? Which ones will you simply listen to? The US Air Force blog response chart is a great starting point for this side of things, though you may want to amend this for your organization.

Employee social media guidelines

As social media tools become more and more ubiquitous, you can’t expect your employees not to use them outside work (or at work, in reality). What’s more, given that they spend most of their waking life at work, it’s tough to expect them to completely avoid talking about it outside the office.

Of all of the policies, these guidelines are most likely to be covered by your existing employee guidelines.

These guidelines serve two purposes:

1. Protecting your organization by setting out boundaries for what employees can and cannot do online;
2. Empowering employees to use social media tools by removing doubt over what is “allowed” and what is not.

Consider covering the following in your employee social media guidelines:

• Boundaries - are employees actively encouraged to engage in conversations regarding the organization (may depend on organizational culture)?
• Transparency - are employees required to identify themselves as employees when discussing the organization (likely: yes)?
• Confidentiality - may employees discuss of confidential information (likely: no)?
• Financials - may employees discuss financial information (likely: no)?
• Consequences - outline the consequences both for the company and the employee when someone says something ill-advised
• Work use – is social media use permitted during work hours (may differ depending on whether employees are encouraged to engage in conversations regarding the organization)?

This is part two of a three-part series on social media policies. To get the full story, check out the rest of the social media policy series. A massive tip-of-the-hat to Michael O’Connor Clarke for his thoughts on some of these topics.

What do you think? What is unnecessary and what am I missing?

Is your organization looking to get started with “this social media thing?” If so, alongside the thinking you should be doing about culture and top-level support, organizational policies should be one of the things you think about first.

Next week I’m delivering a workshop on “Building A Solid Foundation: Social Media Policies, Best Practices And Ethics For Your Organization” at a conference in Ottawa. Thanks to this, social media policies are at the top of my mind right now.

What will you do when someone “talks” to your representatives online? How will you decide whether and how to respond? What if an employee goes rogue and starts posting confidential information online?

Social media moves quickly, and Google has a long memory. A lack of preparation for events like these can mean a slow response, an escalation of issues, and perhaps even lasting damage.

How should you approach this initial thinking?

We recommend two types of policies – internal and external.

Internal Policies

• Blogging policy
• Outbound commenting policy
• General employee guidelines

Public Policies

• Comment policy
• Engagement policy

Over the next couple of posts I’ll take a look at each of these policies in turn, the kind of things you should think about and the kind of things they should cover. Sometimes these things may be covered by your existing employee guidelines; other times you may need to come up with new approaches.

Don’t worry; it’s not that complicated. It just needs a little thought.

If you’ve been around the blog with these tools, am I missing anything in terms of policy types? Which social media policies have you found the most useful?