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 the prior Syme postings on this topic:
May 4, 2010: Developing a Social Media Policy (Part 3): Comparative Analysis of Best Practices
May 1, 2010: Developing a Social Media Policy - Part Two (Collecting Best Practices)
April 23, 2010: Developing a Social Media Policy - Part One
Three Key Elements of Social Media Policy: The Second "P"
In this post, we’ll take a look at what the policy/rules section of your social media policy should look like.
Crafting social media “rules of engagement” can be the most time-consuming part of the policy formation. After you have roughed out your purpose statement (see guidelines in previous post), then it’s time to tackle the policy section. In this post, I’ll address the first of two sections in policy:
Guiding Principles.
In my next post (below), I will address Rules of Engagement, or specific policies.First, I would like to cite Brian Solis’ book
Engage and
Jeremy Rawtich’s session on social media policy at the recent
PRSA Digital Impact Conference for helping me to articulate some of the ideas in this blog post. There are several other people whose resources I have studied, but these two were most helpful.
Section One: Guiding Principles
These are a sub-set of your purpose statement, but more specific. They emanate from your purpose.
1. Ownership -Who do the social media sites really belong to and who is responsible for them? They belong to the department, not to the coaches or staffers that are running them. If the university’s name is on it, it is the property of the university. Consequently, the accounts are “subject to” the university’s code of conduct, the department policy manual, the conference rules and NCAA rules. The language you use in this section will depend on your department culture—it’s either conversational or institutional, or something in between. Also, chain of command goes here.
2. Disclosure- If you manage an account on behalf of the department, information on who you are and what your posts represent should be present on the profile page or on the home page. If multiple people are managing an account, you should come up with an ID tag system. Look at Toyota’s Twitter page. Everyone posting is listed on the home page along with their ID tags on each post they put up. This section should just be guiding language—specific rules later.
3. Registration and Training- This section should include a piece about mandatory registration of each account with the department SM manager along with account emails and passwords. Also, each “manager” should have some kind of mandatory training on how to use social media. I know this is piling up work for SIDs or SM managers, but this piece is critical in long-term reputation management. Account managers should also be asked to “sign-off” (on paper) on the rules of engagement after training. This can be a simple form that is kept with the account name, password and email. Coaches come and go—you need to have a way to provide consistency and access to the accounts. The training piece of this will be discussed in a later blog. Stay tuned.
4. Personal Branding- If you are committed to personal branding (and you should be), here is where you say so and why. You want to let coaches and staffers know they are encouraged to have personal brands—it’s good for the department. However, they need to know that their personal accounts, as long as they are identified as a member of the athletic department staff, need to be subject to the same rules as department sites. I would also include a resource piece here—if you want coaches to develop personal brands, you are going to have to monitor them and help them. Don’t encourage it if you can’t help and evaluate—this could turn into a PR disaster somewhere down the road. You wouldn’t believe some of the posts I’ve seen from coaches around the country—this stuff isn’t innate. Their presence should be planned and purposeful. Here is where a quote from Brain Solis might come in handy, “Participate where your presence is advantageous and mandatory; don’t just participate anywhere and everywhere.” Help them find those places and help them learn how to effectively engage.
Personal branding sites should be subject to all the same guiding principles and rules (see section below) as department sites are. This is critical and non-negotiable. You may need administrative help to get this across. Coaches are, for the most part, autonomous. They don’t like to be told what to do with their program. This will have to become a cultural buy-in.
The Policies You Need in a Social Media Policy (Part Two): Rules of EngagementWhat are the three elements every social media policy needs to convey? Purpose, policies and procedures. Last post I covered the first part of policies--the Guiding Principles, which come from your purpose statement.
Here, we break down the Guiding Principles into Rules of Engagement.
Here's where the particular meat and potatoes of your organization’s policy needs to be communicated.
1. Proprietary Information & Confidentiality: Nuts and bolts use of photos, logos, news stories, links, video, podcasts, etc. Citation. Also, a stern statement here about confidentiality of internal information. Make it known what is and isn’t acceptable in specific language. You may want to have a discussion about affiliations—are you going to allow affiliations outside the department/university to be present in your social media? Also, never comment on anything legal or litigation the department is involved in.
2. Accuracy and Clarity: Don’t link to anything you haven’t thoroughly read or to sites you don’t trust. During the men’s NCAA basketball tourney, I followed a bunch of people on Twitter for info, one of whom was a “sort of” expert in the field of men’s hoops. One of his tweets was just one word—the “F” bomb. After that, I never re-tweeted anything he posted or referred to anything he had said publicly. Make sure your facts and URLs are accurate. As John Wooden said, “be quick, but don’t hurry.” Hurrying can lead to mistakes that might hang you eventually.
Don’t lie. Don’t use jargon--please, don’t use jargon that only a handful of people would understand. Remember, you want to look at what you are doing from the audience’s point of view. Will they feel comfortable and welcomed on your sites? Speak conversationally. Remember, you’re not speaking at people, but with people.
3. Disclosure & Transparency: Managers must ID themselves on their account. It should be up front and noticeable--maybe on profile or front page. If more than one person is using the account, identify them as administrators and use an ID tag system to ID posts. Style and guidelines should be available from the SM Manager. Again, see Toyota's twitter feed for a good example of this.
Transparency is a trickier subject. I would suggest that you make it clear in this section, that the purpose of social media is to foster a conversation. Tell posters to be clear if they have a vested interest in a subject they are posting about (fund raising, ticketed events, etc.). Be clear on who you are and how you are affiliated. Don’t lie, don’t give too much information, don’t say, you don’t know (say you’ll find out).
Remember that you are dealing with personal lives of young people--the student-athletes. Ever heard of FERPA? If not, maybe a reference to some policy here. I would make it a policy to never talk about student-athletes unless it is in relation to some accomplishment or award.
4. Good Sportsmanship: Businesses may call this section Diplomacy, but I think sportsmanship is a word our world relates to better. Don’t talk about internal matters in your department or anyone else’s department. Practice generosity. Find something good to say, or don’t say it. Don’t bash the competition, the conference, the NCAA, your community, etc. Politics and religion should be off limits. Don’t gender bash—sometimes this happens inadvertently in the world of athletics. If in doubt, have them ask SM Manager. Common sense and common courtesy.
5. Disclaimers: Make it clear on the profile page or home page that these are the posters' opinions, not necessarily those of the department. This is also a good place for a posting policy for fans, something a lot of sites have. It doesn’t give you latitude to delete posts, but gives fans an idea what is acceptable and helps the community self-police.
6. Respect in the "Social Media Space" and Reputation Management: • Make it clear you want to advance conversation in a meaningful way. Don’t pick fights or engage in them.
• Answers questions—don’t broadcast your opinions in answers to questions. Don’t promote products as a sidebar to question-answering.
• Respect people’s opinions. If you have a fan message board, you may want to take a look at it. Take note of the volume of some of the conversations. What posts look respectful to you? Which ones are disrespectful? Now, look at some fan Facebook pages. Do you notice a difference in tone? You want your sites to be respectful, not bastions of anonymous finger pointing session. You can create that culture by how you foster conversations.
• Do not post anything you wouldn’t say at a public meeting or that you wouldn’t say to the media. Of course, some people may need some coaching here. Appropriate speech, especially in an athletic department, is sometimes open to debate. Informal conversations can give birth to quotes you'd like to take back. Be careful.
• Absolutely, do not have people posting randomly about matters that relate to matters that affect the department’s reputation. This could be internal or external information. Everyone with a department account, should be aware of that line—draw it in the training sessions. If you dismiss a coach, other staff members should not be posting their opinions. Make sure you have a good reputation management strategy in place.
You better have a discussion internally about whether or not you will ever delete a tweet or post of a fan. If you are going to engage in social media, you have to be willing to take the good with the bad. Purpose not to delete posts you "don't agree with" or posts that criticize you. Let the community self-police and answer all legitimate questions. You can't possibly be doing everything perfectly. Let the fans speak to each other, and to you.
Encourage people who have a real beef to contact you personally. And, you can gently remind posters of your posting policies. Graphic language and porn postings should be removed, but make this clear in your posting policies so people know if they indluge in that behavior, their posts will be removed. Tell staffers with personal branding accounts to contact the SM Manager if they have questions about how to deal with negativity on their sites. Coach this in the training as well.
7. Security: Again, remember FERPA. Also, don’t tweet phone numbers, email addresses that aren’t institutional, or any other information that is personal. Give training to your student-athletes about appropriate use of social media (a whole different subject). Student-athletes should not be “friending” media or fans. Facebook accounts should be fan pages and not personal pages. Your guidelines with media should be well-defined with coaches AND media. I don't like the idea of encouraging coaches and media to be "friends" on private social media accounts, but stuff happens. This is particularly problematic on Twitter and FAcebook fan pages where anyone can follow. Also, defer to any institution policies here. Once your policy is set, send it out to the media as well.
Also, I recommend cruising your Twitter account regularly for porn followers. Block these followers--your other followers can see who is following you.
8. Crisis Communications/Emergencies: In the event of a department crisis or emergency—this should be defined by your crisis management plan—social media managers should be given specific instructions about what to post and what not to post. It is better, in these situations, to have coaches and staffers who have personal branding accounts defer to the department feeds. In the event of an emergency, if immediate information needs to be given out—all department accounts should be broadcasting the same information. Give the info (verbatim) to account managers to post and ask them to promote the department feeds that are designated to handle the crisis communications. There should be one voice and one message in a crisis, but it can be broadcast through many channels.
Now, we have looked at the second "P"--Policies. Can you think of a situation where you would delete a post by a fan on a social media site?
Next Up: The last of the three "P"s of developing a social media policy: Procedures.