Manage Social Media Before It Manages You

In the past few weeks we've been helping an agency to pull together a social media policy. The intent is to come up with a simple document to guide staff on how and when to respond and contribute to social media when they're on company time.

And last week Australia's biggest telco,Telstra, announced a social media policy for its employees.

With more and more people communicating online, and brands increasingly finding themselves mentioned on Twitter, Facebook etc, organisations interested in protecting their brand need guidelines on how to manage these digital discussions.

We base our approach around a few fundamentals we hope are easy to understand and easy to apply.

• Organisations should be clear about who can represent their brand on social media platforms. Can all staff take part or only designated people. When first starting out ask yourself do you want everybody involved? Or is it better to limit participation to say staff with communications or client service responsibilities? At least initially.
  

• It is in your organisation's interests to ensure the people who represent your online interests have personal profiles on Facebook and other sites that are consistent with what you expect from your spokespersons.
  

• Google never forgets. Staff need to be careful about what they post online. Materiel destined for online audiences must be accurate and respect commercial in confidence, privacy, copyright, trademark and other requirements. It will be an art finding the balance between speed and accuracy.
  

• It can be tempting to respond with sarcasm, fury or even be condescending when commenting on online information you think is misguided, plain wrong or mischievous. Online conversations are easily inflamed so remind staff to keep conversations professional and to the point.
  

Social media is not going to go away. Nor do I think will it completely replace more traditional communications.

Now is the time to learn how to learn to manage social media before it manages you.