Last night I attended the Winter Panel put on by Social Media Club – Knoxville which was focused on social media liability, ethics and policy.  The featured panelists were Erin Donovan of WBIR, legal and marketing consultant Jeremy Floyd and Chad Parizman of Scripps Networks who did a great job representing a few perspectives on social media, and entertaining the crowd with funny quips. The evening covered a broad range of topics from the local liability story of The Pizza Kitchen (link to News Sent) to understanding the line where policy ends and ethics begin. If you missed the event checkout the tweets about the evening #smcknox.

One thing that wasn’t covered in depth that I wanted to shed some light on is the difference between policy and guidelines. Often the term “social media policy” is used to cover a document that is both policy and guidelines but they are very different documents and serve very different roles.  Moving forward in this post I’ll use the terms policy and guidelines to represent different pieces of that social media policy document.

When we talk about policy, we’re really talking about a document that is going to largely drafted by legal and HR professionals. It’s essentially about what employee’s SHOULDN’T do.While a very important piece of the puzzle if you’re a in marketing role this part of the document will seem very dry.  This document will detail who can can be a spokesperson for the brand utilizing these channels, what other policies they must adhere to in this sphere and the repercussions for not following the policy.  This document will read like a legal contract because, well it is.  Ultimately the role of part of the document is to protect the company, also known as CYA.

The part of the document you most often see in social media circles is what I’m going to call guidelines.  This is what you see from IBM, Intel, etc. It will be drafted by the team responsible for the message (marketing or PR).  It’s essentially about what employee’s SHOULD do. This policy needs to be written in professional but human voice. When I think about writing this part of the document, I’ve found it easiest to put myself in the shoes of an enthusiastic young employee.  That employee will be very familiar with how to use technology to communicate but given that they’ve had limited work experience they won’t know the rules of the road, either for your company or just in general.  So it needs to answer questions like, “what can I say?” and “how can I say it?” and present the rules of engagement as your company defines them.  For example it’s best practice that all employee’s who self-designate as an employee of your company on their digital space(s) blog, twitter, facebook, podcast, etc to also include a disclaimer that all thoughts “are theirs and do not represent my employer or clients”.   It’s also a great idea to define some of those things in the guidelines that you don’t want them to do, but still in that human voice that employees can understand.  I’ve pulled an example below from the IBM Social Computing Guidelines, most employees may not think about the topic it covers but it certainlu happens all the time.

Don’t pick fights. When you see misrepresentations made about IBM by media, analysts or by other bloggers, you may certainly use your blog—or join someone else’svto point that out. Always do so with respect, stick to the facts and identify your appropriate affiliation to IBM. Also, if you speak about a competitor, you must make sure that what you say is factual and that it does not disparage the competitor. Avoid unnecessary or unproductive arguments. Brawls may earn traffic, but nobody wins in the end. Don’t try to settle scores or goad competitors or others into inflammatory debates. Here and in other areas of public discussion, make sure that what you are saying is factually correct.

Another good idea is to post a basic guideline on what to talk about.  For example my friend David Thomas works in social media at SAS, never heard of SAS? That’s because they are a business software company, purely a b2b.  They have a HUGE customer base and every employee doesn’t know every client they serve.  Which isn’t a problem normally but it can be.

Consider the following hypothetical situation employee A ends up in a hotel that she thinks treats her poorly, she does what a lot of us would do starts tweeting about that bad experience at company A.  But the kicker is the she has no idea that company A has been a client of her company for five years and they are currently in the process of signing an extension to that contract, and they aren’t too happy that the employee of the company they are signing a large contract with is talking negatively about them publicly.  So what does SAS do?  They just have the guideline that if you’ve chosen to affiliate with the company online you shouldn’t speak out negatively about other people or companies because for them, the risk isn’t worth it (see part of their policy below). That doesn’t mean every company should have that guideline, but it’s something to consider depending on your business.

SAS employees are polite, courteous, honorable people who don’t say bad things about other people or other companies, even if they are our competitors. Remember, if you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it online.

Social media policies are hot topics, just don’t forget that the policy and the guidelines need to work in tadem to be the killer policy!

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments what you think about policy – or if you’ve done some drafting what you think is import to have in each policy.