Create Your Community Policies – SMPG Community Building Checklist

As part of your social media strategy, consider what policies should govern your enterprise’s social computing use

• Establish, in writing, best practices and procedures
• Ensure staff is on message
• Empower staff to be proactive and participative
• Position community as means to engage, not a distraction
• Create Rules of Engagement
  • What to do with negative content
  • What to do with negative members (more later)
  • What to do with staff that blabs
  • Study how the US Air Force deals with various types of community members, in the next figure

Figure 1 — Air Force Web Posting Assessment Flowchart[1]

• Decide whether to hold employees and other community members personally responsible for content they publish
• Decide how staff should Identify themselves in posts
• Decide if staff members who post elsewhere should add a disclaimer to their posts: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent [Organization’s] positions, strategies or opinions.”
• Encourage all members to respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws and set penalties for non-compliance
• Confidentiality: Decide whether to prohibit citing or referencing clients, partners or suppliers without their approval
• Create a linkback policy for material reposted from other sources
• Create a prohibited language policy restricting hate speech, ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity
• If you are regulated, ensure all employees understand what can and cannot be said online
  • Understand the legal ramifications of creating a public record or a public meeting by discussing topics online
  • User-Generated Content (UGC) may need to comply with policy, copyright, trademark
  • May need to treat information as part of records subject to retention policies
• Be careful out there: Some laws may restrict your ability to censor employees online:
  • Political Opinions
    • Many states, (such as California) prohibit employers from regulating their employees’ political activities
    • Unionizing
    • In many states, talking or writing about unionizing is strongly protected; union contracts may permit blogging; states may protect “concerted” speech — protecting two or more people who discuss workplace conditions
  • Whistleblowing
    • Many may believe reporting regulatory violations or illegal activities online is protected, but whistleblowers must report problems to the appropriate regulatory or law enforcement bodies first
  • Reporting on Your Work for the Government
    • Government workers writing online about their work is protected speech under the First Amendment except for classified or confidential information
  • Legal Off-Duty Activities
    • Some states may protect an employee’s legal off-duty blogging, especially if the employer has no policy or an unreasonably restrictive policy with regard to off-duty speech activities
  • Reporting Outside Social Media Site Memberships
    • Some organizations require employees to report other places where they contribute online
  • Set Guidelines for At-Work Social Media Use
    • Most enterprises believe that at-work use of social media saps productivity, but some studies find just the opposite.
• Review the following policies for ideas for your social media policy:[2]
  • H&R Block’s Response Process — slidesha.re/q6agAL
  • IBM Social Computing Guidelines — ibm.co/bNJl7V
  • Nordstrom — bit.ly/oPbXPa
  • SAP Social Media Participation Guidelines — scr.bi/pFxUJL
  • Thomson Reuters — bit.ly/oLaWbe
  • Walmart’s Twitter External Discussion Guidelines — bit.ly/nnKcU5
  • Wells Fargo Blogs and Social Media — bit.ly/pp5bqs