Forbes published yet another summary of what CEOs ought to be considering as they ponder guidelines for use of social media within the company. It used to be "blogging guidelines" - many of us created them for our companies years ago - IBM, Yahoo, Ogilvy. We have since expanded ours to cover more recent platforms and behaviors like Twitter and the hyper-public status of Facebook profiles (I encourage staff to think of their Facebook presence as a professional outpost - forget trying to draw a line between "private" and professional)
Our attitude towards our team is to encourage them to communicate not discourage. We are, after all, professional communicators. Our guidlines are about empowerment.
We take a lot for granted. I heard of a client who just recently made it possible for staff to access YouTube and Facebook. I think that type of restrictive access is more prevelant than I would have guessed.
Joshua-Michéle Ross from O'Reilly pens this particular list. The parts that capture a great spirit include:
"Build your policies around job performance, not fuzzy concerns about productivity.
If your employees are using Facebook at work, they are also likely checking work e-mail after dinner or at odd hours of the day. Don't ask them to give up the former if you expect them to continue the latter. If you have good performance measurements, playing the "lost productivity" card is a canard.
Begin from a Position of Trust.
While there are possible negatives involved in having employees on the social Web, most employees have common sense. Begin with a set of possibilities first (increasing awareness, improving customer service, gaining customer insight and so on) then draw up a list of worst-case scenarios (bad mouthing the company, inappropriate language, leaking IP, to name a few)..."
I have attached a draft of our own social media policy for our staff as it may be helpful to you.
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