Social Media Policy? Do you have a tradeshow policy or a phone conversation policy?

By Andy Reierson, June 30, 2010

Social media usage by businesses in Fargo, Duluth, St. Cloud, Grand Forks and Anchorage is increasing everyday and rightfully so. It’s a great way to connect and engage customers and prospects. And having a solid strategy to do so will allow you to move the needle and help you reach your goals and objectives for your social media program and your business.

With this increase in usage, however, HR directors are scrambling to govern social media activities by employees. This has led to companies large and small creating social media policies for their employees.

Mike Volpe from Hubspot takes a different look at social media policy development in his post Why Social Media Policy is Stupid. In his post Mike states “… the best “policy” is to hire smart people, give them the right coaching and training, set the correct culture around customer interaction, and then punish those who misbehave.” Although we have a social media policy for employees at Flint Group and have helped many clients develop social media strategies and social media policies, I kind of agree with him.

So what do you think, do businesses need a social media policy?

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  • Thanks for mentioning my post! I think the comments and debate have been really interesting. For anyone who wants to see the original post, the link is here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/t...
  • Thanks for the comment Mike! Your post offered a great new perspective on social media policy and got my head racing.
  • Libby Hall
    All the guidelines in the world won't fix a disgruntled employee's complaints, or make a dumb employee smart. But...they remind everyone to use common sense. That no matter how frustrated you are, it's not okay to post, "OMG SOME PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS" from your Blackberry as you leave a client meeting.

    Plus it opens lines of communication about grey areas. If I want to write a personal blog post under my own name about a campaign, is that acceptable as long as I don't give confidential information? Is it okay if I use my personal Twitter account for networking? A policy makes it acceptable (encouraged?) to ask these questions when the ideas might otherwise be dropped.
  • Great points Libby. I think a lot of this stems from social media being relatively new to organizations, so they haven't yet figured out how to handle the unexpected. A good policy should be looked at as a way to define gray areas, but not as a way to make up for a lack of common sense. Thanks for the great questions
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