Chris Syme serves as a sports information director at Montana State and coordinates website and new media duties among her responsibilities. This is from her blog "New Adventures of an Old SID." Among her duties at Montana State are website and new media coordinator, cross country, track and field and golf. She was a presenter at the 2009 CoSIDA Convention and will speak at the 2010 CoSIDA Convention in San Francisco.
SEE ALSO:
7 Social Media Rules of Thumb (by Thom Mitchell)COMMENTARY: Developing a Social Media Policy - Part One, by Chris Syme (Montana State)Montana State Bobcats Athletics Website: http://www.msubobcats.com/Chris Syme's blog: http://www.newadventuresofanoldsid.blogspot.com/
Do you remember Steve Urkel? One of his most famous lines was, "Did I do that?" after he made a bumbling mistake that destroyed some piece of valuable furniture. One of my biggest fears is having a coach walk in my office after they've posted something on Twitter we got nailed for by our fan base and saying, "Did I do that?"
Not that we have a bunch of Urkels in our department, but we do have a bunch of coaches on Twitter, Facebook and blogging without any real guidelines other than their own common sense. Luckily, we've been coaching them on the appropriate uses of social media, but there have been a few instances already where we've had to ask a coach to delete a tweet or take down a photo on a blog.
I don't think having a social media policy can guarantee something negative won't ever happen with its use, but when we look at what happened at Nestle, Toyota, and others, we've learned that "winging it" isn't the best policy. So the first step is look at best practices. What's out there?
Before I got going, I decided to look at what everyone else was doing.
Homework time.
I don't like to reinvent the wheel. I ran across a great blog entry by
Doug Cornelius of Compliancebuilding.com. He first started collecting policies when he wanted to formulate one of his own. The
database includes over 150 policies and URL links to each. Another list with most of the same policies was put together by
Chris Boudreaux at Social Media Governance.
Now starts the process of looking at each policy and answering some basic questions before I separate them it in to two piles: those that deserves further dissection and those that are irrelevant to my task.
1. Does the policy have the basic elements that experts have defined as being necessary to a policy? Sharlyn Lauby of Internal Talent Management wrote a good article on the basic elements of a social media policy that agrees with most of the other material I've read--give or take a couple pieces.
These include:
Purpose, rules of engagement (which includes info on responsible posting, copyright and proprietary information, permissions, etc.), consideration of audience, authenticity, voice, how to respond to negative feedback, where to get help, monitoring procedures, and possible consequences for policy violations.
2. Is the policy succinct, or is it bloated and cumbersome?
Some of the government policies I've looked at are extremely bloated. A good one that is succinct and to the point is Dell's. Toss in the trash all the ones that are over three pages long. More on this later...
With these two simple guidelines, I can now weed through the social media policies I've collected and separate them in the two piles. After I have the pile that warrants further consideration, I start combing through each one. Next, I will develop a comparative table that lists all the basic elements I need and how each policy addresses that piece. Sort of like comparative shopping online.
I am going to invite you to join me in the process. Please take a look at some of the online policies and see if there are elements in each one that you like. I would sure like to have some feedback on what you think. You can email me at
csyme@msubobcats.com. Which ones look good to you? Which elements are important to you?
Next up: Comparing Best Practices of the Best Policies