social media policy

One of the most common issues I find with organizations is that they confuse having a social media policy with adopting rules of engagement for how their stakeholders should engage in participatory media. While they do overlap (some examples of social media policy go into detail about how for an example an employee should behave in social networks) they are not the same. The difference in my opinion lies in scenario planning.

A guy interviews with a company. The guy doesn't get the job.

Three years later, the guy sits down in a coffee shop. He pulls out his phone, opens the Foursquare app. Scans for nearby businesses. Sees that the company is right nearby. The guy leaves a tip on Foursquare about how much the company sucks anyway.

Some small businesses start without a business plan, finding success in a breakthrough product or service early on and building upon that success organically. However, it’s inevitable that the venture will need to have a structured business plan put in place at some point if the business is expected to scale, expand and ultimately thrive.

Employees are visiting Facebook more than any other site when they are at work, and twice as often as the second most visited site, Google. Research out this week from Network Box, a Managed Security Services company, shows that visits to the social network accounted for 6.8% of all workplace traffic in Q1 2010, exactly twice the 3.4% of all traffic that went to Google.

This week, ESPN, a US sports cable TV network, appeared to tell its employees that they could no longer use Twitter except to Tweet about ESPN. A few hours later it turned out that things were not quite so simple as ESPN released its internal social media policy. Whist perhaps a little direct in its choice of wording and phrases, this policy is a good example of what every firm should have.